Russian’s Fear: Crisis Will Stop the Press : Journalism: A brash reporter for a brash Moscow paper was concerned for press freedoms during failed ’91 coup. With turmoil embroiling Russia, she is again preparing for the worst.

It was 2:25 a.m. and a tense silence filled the Moscow News building in Pushkin Square. As she looked out the window, Yevgenia Albats saw Soviet tanks rumbling to a halt. Any second she expected armed soldiers to burst through the newsroom doors, arresting her and two other female reporters inside.

There was still time to flee. But Albats had a better idea.

“I went through my editor’s desk and found a bottle of Armenian cognac,” she says with a chuckle. “And we three women drank. We toasted our wonderful country. We toasted our great careers. For us, it was all over.”

On Aug. 21, 1991, the Soviet Union teetered on the edge of chaos. A right-wing coup threatened to smash the political reforms of perestroika, and one of its key targets was the Moscow News, an outspoken voice for change. Few people watched those rapidly moving events with more alarm than Albats.

The turmoil was eerily similar to the troubles now engulfing Russia, and as the country’s current political crisis boils over, press freedoms could once again be in jeopardy. Yevgenia Albats has seen it all before.

Brash and unbridled, she was the first reporter in her country to investigate the KGB and expose many of its secrets. Her sleuthing caused a sensation and made Albats a media celebrity in the late 1980s. That she was a Jewish woman in her 30s made her achievement all the more remarkable.

Treading where no Soviet reporter had ever gone, Albats tracked down KGB interrogators and torturers who were living quiet lives as academics. She was Lois Lane in the Lubyanka, braving anti-Semitic attacks and speaking her mind in the liberal climate of glasnost .

Suddenly, a country that had known nothing of press freedom was getting a crash course from Moscow News and other papers. In a land of thought control and blind ideology, old-fashioned investigative reporting was being born.

But there was hell to pay: KGB agents tried to quash Albats’ stories, and one official threatened the life of her young daughter. Higher-ups schemed to suppress “Time Bomb,” the book she wrote about the secret police. And now, as army tanks encircled the paper on a late summer night in 1991, the battle for a free Soviet media seemed lost.

“I realized on that night that these years before had been the greatest years of my life,” Albats says. “I would never forget them. They were taaarifffic! And now, we were dead!”

It had all the makings of classic Russian tragedy--a roiling drama with a heart-stopping first act. But history threw Albats a curve.

As dawn approached on Aug. 22, troops outside the Moscow News refused to storm the paper. The coup was suppressed, President Mikhail Gorbachev returned briefly to power, and the nation was optimistic that democratic reforms would improve its quality of life.

Yet the euphoria soon dissolved into unrest, and this week’s state of emergency in Moscow has all but shattered Albats’ lingering hope for change. Like her homeland, she’s grown bitter, restive and cynical.

“What you see going on in Russia today is not about government or ideology,” she says with impatience. “It is only about power. Both of these guys (Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his rival, Parliamentary Speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov) are fighting for themselves and not for the people.”

The average Russian doesn’t care about this conflict, Albats adds, “because people want to rebuild the country. We have had enough politics. We are tired.”

This is the story of a firebird who lost her flame, a cautionary tale of modern Russia. Once giddy over the promise of innovation and new ideas, Albats, 34, has turned sour on the future. As glasnost gives way to gridlock, she’s without a compass, unable to find her place in a troubled new order.

In March of last year, she quit her newspaper job after learning that Moscow News had hired former KGB agents as reporters. Disillusioned, Albats began raising funds to start a lifestyle magazine for Russian readers. But money is scarce.

More recently, she left her country to take a one-year Neiman Fellowship for journalists at Harvard University. Her husband, author Yaroslav Golovenov, stayed home for the year.

“What’s to be with me?” she asks in halting English. “I will have to fight for something new and much better when I return home.”

She has some impressive folks pulling for her.

“Yevgenia Albats is a good girl,” says Yelena Bonner, widow of Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet dissident and Nobel Prize winner. “Today, it is easy for some people to be brave in Russia. But she was brave before it became easy.”

Others praise Albats’ stories for triggering political change. “The Communists never thought these kinds of exposes would be a problem,” says historian Robert Conquest, a professor at Stanford’s Hoover Institute on War and Revolution. “The thought was, you can tell the truth because a regime can’t survive on lies. But they were caught in a bind because telling the truth did undermine the system.”

On a chilly winter’s night, Albats lays out bowls of chopped pickles and Cheez Doodles in her Cambridge apartment. With a flourish, she brings a bottle of icy vodka to the table and toasts the new flat where she’s just moved with her 4-year-old daughter, Lola. It’s a bright, roomy place, much better than the freezing walk-up she had been living in for several months after coming to the United States.

“Can you believe those sons of bitches who owned the place I was before?” she asks, pleased with the sounds of an unfamiliar language. “Those nasty sons of bitches.”

A solid, broad-shouldered woman, Albats flings her arms wide to make the point, and tosses her head back with a low, rolling laugh. Sometimes her contralto voice becomes a shout, and it can quickly silence a noisy room.

“I come from poor country,” she continues, “and still I had more heat and hot water back home than at Harvard. How is this true in United States?”

It’s one of the few positive things Albats has to say about Russia. Like many of her comments, the words come gushing out in a torrent. Loud. Boisterous. Exaggerated. Her English is faulty but vigorous, and she carefully tries to improve her grammar when friends point out mistakes.

Nowadays, it’s a useful skill. “Time Bomb” is about to be published in America, and Albats has been lecturing to college audiences around the country. They want to know what she’s learned since the August 1991 coup. And what does she think about America?

“Is very good question,” Albats says, mulling over her answer.

The moment is broken up by Lola, an elfin, blue-eyed girl who comes racing out of her bedroom tooting a toy harmonica. She leaps into her mother’s arms, bounces onto the sofa, grabs a TV remote and starts channel surfing. Finally, she decides on a cartoon show.

“Do you know what I am wanting to know most of all?” Albats asks in a whisper. “I am wanting to know, who is this Bugs Bunny?”

As a girl, Yevgenia Albats was always asking questions. Too many questions, her teachers complained. The kind that could get her in trouble.

When an instructor declared that Dostoevsky was not a “model” Russian author, Albats scoffed. When another said the Soviet Union was crushed by Adolf Hitler’s 1941 invasion, she argued that Russia was poorly prepared.

Albats’ parents were proud of her feisty intelligence, but worried about the political consequences. Especially when anti-Semitism became a problem.

“On the way to school, kids would call me a dirty kike,” Albats recalls. “This is how I learned about being a Jew. I learned to fight back.”

She also learned how to write. As a student at Moscow State University, Albats plunged into journalism, crafting colorful, first-person stories about jumping from planes in a parachute and descending to the bottom of the Black Sea in a submarine. She sought work with Pravda, but was turned down because of her religion.

The tables turned in 1986 when she caught the eye of Yegor Yakovlev, a journalist who became editor of Moscow News. Previously, the paper was a Communist propaganda sheet, but Yakovlev vowed to make it the leading voice of perestroika. With little effort, he persuaded Albats to come on board.

She was encouraged to pursue any subject, and after several months the path led to Alexander Khvat. A onetime interrogator and torturer in Stalin’s prisons, he was now living in a pleasant apartment on Gorky Street.

“I knocked on the door, and there he was, a kindly old man in a sweater,” Albats says. “He looked like a nice grandfather. But then I realized he was a grandfather with blood on his hands.”

It was the first time a Soviet reporter had confronted a former KGB agent and interviewed him for a newspaper. Albats spent four hours with the startled Khvat, grilling him on his sadistic 1942 interrogation of geneticist Nicolai Vavilov. Her article caused an uproar, but soon she was onto bigger game.

Why, she asked, was Vladimir Boyarsky--one of Stalin’s most feared inquisitors--living the respectable life of an academic in Moscow? Pouring through long-forgotten files, Albats told the Soviet Union about Boyarsky’s crimes, including his eight-day torture of a female schoolteacher. It was sensational stuff, and the repercussions were enormous.

Never mind that an anonymous KGB agent phoned to say that Albats would pay for these investigations with her daughter’s life. She responded with a stream of obscenities and shamed the caller into silence. The real danger, she recalls, was that officials were trying to kill off Moscow News.

“Every month they tried to close us down, and this is how we lived,” she says with anger. “But I owe everything to Yakovlev. He was my protection.”

The question arises: How did Albats acquire KGB documents?

At times, she says, materials were sent to her anonymously. Periodically, she would buy documents: “I treat these KGB people like prostitutes; they get money, they do a service, and that’s it.” Once, when Albatm was eight months’ pregnant, archivists told her she was forbidden to photocopy some files. When she claimed she was about to faint from the heat, they relented.

“You should have seen the look on these men’s faces,” Albats recalls. “I am very, very big, out to here, and all they think is, ‘Give this woman what she wants right now, or she will give birth right here!’ They died!”

During the late 1980s, millions of readers became familiar with Albats’ byline. She wrote two widely read articles about Lola’s birth, and exposed the shabby conditions of maternity hospitals. But it was all a warm-up for the 1991 coup.

The night it erupted, most of Albats’ colleagues raced out of the Moscow News offices, either to cover the story or to find haven. Yet she and two other reporters stayed behind to guard the newsroom and feed information to newspapers around the world. When the vigil was all over, they drank some more.

Since then, it’s all been downhill: Yakovlev was recently fired from his new job as a TV executive, for airing a program that Yeltsin disliked. Democracy is a dirty word in the bread lines. And the KGB is as strong as ever, deeply enmeshed in the new government.

“It is very depressing, what has happened,” Albats says with a sigh. “And when I think of going home this summer, I don’t know anymore. What is home?”

As of now, her plan is to raise money for “Style of Life,” a projected magazine that would tell Russian consumers about everything from sex and childbirth to interior decorating and car repair. It would be the first publication of its kind in Russia, and Albats’ eyes light up at the thought.

“In my country, people have never known the idea of a private life, their own life, away from party and ideology. I will give it to them.”

It’s a tall order. Maybe impossible. But that’s what they told Albats when she first challenged the KGB--and her confidence has never wavered.

“I will do what I do, and I will know what I want to know,” she says with a husky laugh, cuddling Lola in her arms. “After all this time, who will stop me?”