On the best story I ever covered for Kyiv Post, my editor told me I was wasting my time.
From a journalistic point of view, of course, he was right. It was October 1997, a beautiful Indian Summer day in Kyiv and mostly I was trying to think of a way to get out of the newsroom and avoid having to spend hours in front of a computer screen knocking out another “foreign business screwed by Ukrainian officials” story.
That kind of article of course was just the kind of solid news copy that helped the Kyiv Post establish its reputation back in the old days – but I wanted out into the sunshine.
“It’s just the kind of subject ex-pats want to read about, and the pictures will be great,” I told Igor Greenwald.
The great newspaper editors have a whole arsenal of code words, gestures and facial tics to put a reporter in his place if the reporter is trying to play fast and loose with journalistic standards, or just weasel out of a boring assignment.
In Igor Greenwald’s case, it is a momentary face that looks like it just bit into a lemon.
“That ain’t news,” Greenwald said. “Find something real to write about.”
“Pleeeeaaaaaase,” I whined.
“Get the hell out of here! Why can’t you go do find something like the french fries story?” Greenwald said.
My french fries article, that was a classic story.
McDonald’s had put in its very first restaurant outside Kyiv, in Kharkiv, and once Micky D’s paid everyone they needed to pay and got the Kharkiv restaurant going, bringing several million dollars of direct foreign investment to a place that, prior to that, basically didn’t know what foreign investment was, the local food inspectorate decided there was a problem with the french fries. According to the food inspector, a small portion of fries was supposed to weigh 140 grams, and secret agents of the Ukrainian State Food Inspectorate established that sometimes it was 135 grams or even 130. (Small friends, big headaches: Agency alleges McDonald’s spuds are underweight)
It was absurd and a shakedown, of course. In those days there was no restaurant service culture in Ukraine at all, and love them or hate them one of the things McDonald’s has always done, is make the same food to the same standards every place on the planet, and in Ukraine too, and short-weighting a small fries is the way Ukrainian restaurateurs did business. Not Micky D’s.
So, for that story, in the name of Kyiv Post and crusading journalism, I hit both restaurants, interviewed the corporate flaks (“For us a satisfied customer is always our top priority”, etc. etc.), grandmothers sampling McDonald’s ice cream for the first time (“Not bad, but this American ice cream is too cold and too expensive and our Ukrainian ice cream is much tastier”) and a chunky woman with henna hair and gold teeth the Ukrainian State Food Inspectorate designated the official who gets to answer impolite questions from Kyiv Post (“Our job is to protect the consumer and foreign companies are sneaky…no, of course we never take bribes, we are Ukrainian government officials after all.”)
For a few years after that, when pundits decided to slag Ukraine’s business environment in public, there was a reasonable chance my McDonald’s story would get cited as a case in point. And I got to eat a lot of french fries. That was a pretty good story.
But sometimes, it’s the bad stories that you remember, 20 years later.
In the 1990s, Ukrainian journalists would get murdered from time to time, and as it worked out I knew several of them.
It’s one thing to write a news story, and you’re just organizing facts.
It’s another thing, if you interview the managing editor of an independent newspaper that stood up to the authorities in the Soviet days, the guy is an institution, and then first you have to write the story about how he got gunned down, and then you have to go interview a newsroom full of reporters and editors, the majority of them middle-aged women, and ask the question “OK, the editor you had for the last couple of decades is dead, how do you feel and now what are you going to do?”
That’s what happened when the Kyiv Post put me on the Borys Derevyanko story – he ran Vechernaya Odesa newspaper for years and years, and made a point of identifying corrupt city officials and their mobster buddies and making public the cash streams. He was a guy with white hair and those thick Soviet glasses and a real Odesan way of speaking, with lots of Yiddish and sarcasm.
“Our newspaper’s job is to make a big stink (khipish) and headaches (tsaures) for the authorities,” Derevyanko told me. “What, you think the authorities will behave themselves if we don’t?”
Someone shot him down in a stairwell. Vechernaya Odesa carried on. If you work as a reporter long enough, you eventually will interview more than a few people who die violently. Derevyanko was my first. (Murder silences maverick editor, Kyiv Post, Aug. 14, 1997)
But sometimes the good guys win, even in old-time Ukraine, and your article is a part of that.
That was what happened with the Miss Spain story. I hadn’t been working for the Kyiv Post for two months, I’m sitting in the newsroom trying to make myself write a banking story, and Greenwald tells me “Go to the Bingo discotheque, there’s some kind of beauty contest and some scandal about goons dragging a naked contestant out of her shower. Talk to this Lebanese guy.”
The guy was Walid Harfoush, who now runs Euronews in most of East Europe, but at the time was a junior entrepreneur with his brother Omar.
One of the Harfoush brothers’ enterprises was a beauty contest they were running with some local businessmen who, I found, all seemed to have buzz haircuts, thick necks, gun-shaped bulges under their sport jackets, and a real dislike for reporters.
The thugs blew me off but Harfoush pretty much confirmed what Greenwald told me, and said there was a press event the next day I could attend and I could talk to the beauties myself. So I did, along with Katya Gorchinskaya, who in due time became one of the reporters that set up the YanukovychLeaks page, but at the time was just a reporter looking for ways out of the newsroom like me.
Normally I don’t like to share bylines but in those days attractive women had a way of distracting me from my work, and there were a lot of beauty queens to interview so I figured I needed Katya’s help.
Looking back, I’m amazed at the thoroughness of our reporting on that story. (Panicked contestants flee pageant, Kyiv Post, Sept. 4, 1997).
Between the two of us, Katya and I interviewed six or seven original sources, we took statements from the Harfoush brothers, the thuggy organizers and a couple of embassies, and in the end we confirmed our facts and Kyiv Post broke the story that yes, the organizers decided to force the contestants to be present at some kind of suare at the Bingo disco, that pretty much all the European women said it wasn’t on the schedule and they preferred stay in their hotel rooms, that big Ukrainian guys unlocked doors and used strong language to compel these beauty queens to go to the Bingo, and yes Miss England got dragged out of her shower, although whether she was in her clothes and hiding, or soaped down and naked, we never found out for sure.
Katya got the confirmation from Miss Spain, and I got the second confirmation from a French photographer.
A boss gangster guy asked me, after our face time with the contestants was over, if he could get an advance copy of our story, seeing as he had allowed Katya and me to talk with “his” pretty European women. That was a day I learned I am a newsman.
Without thinking much I told him: “You can read the story when my newspaper prints it. You can find Kyiv Post in any kiosk, it costs a hryvnia.”
In the three years and change I wrote for Kyiv Post, there were all sorts of great stories.
I went to Sudak in Crimea, found Ukrainian navy marine mammals research center, wrote a story about how Yasha the dolphin was a cold war fighter now entertaining kids in a Sea World show. The story tagline was my interview of Yasha: it is not every story that carries original comment from a cetacean. (Dolphins find new ‘porpoise,” Kyiv Post, Aug. 5, 1999)
I went to Dnipropetrovsk to Yuzhmash, where they design rockets and intercontinental ballistic missiles, and I interviewed Yury Smetanin, an old school rocket scientist who designed the Satana ICBMs that were pointed at my country during the Cold War.
He was a big guy, in his late 60s, still with a hard handshake and a booming voice, and he hadn’t met many Americans face-to-face so after the interview we drank a toast to peace and keeping Armageddon theoretical. He also was a mortar man and he had fought all the way from Stalingrad to Berlin, in the infantry. I remember, talking to the man, I couldn’t decide what was the rarer opportunity, talking to a Soviet rocket scientist or a Red Army soldier that survived some of the worst fighting, in any war, ever. But I knew I was lucky to be the reporter that interviewed him.
But the very best Kyiv Post story I ever did was this: I learned there was an aerobics class being held not too far from my newsroom, its attendance was good, and in those days the idea of a Kyiv woman intentionally putting on sports clothes and sweating in public was a bit shocking. In the 1990s, Ukrainian ladies didn’t do that sort of thing.
So, my idea was to attend one of the classes, which was called “fitness” or “sheyping,” do exercises with the fitness students, interview them, and profile how some modern Ukrainians are breaking with Soviet norms. Of course really it was all just a plot to insinuate myself into a room full of hot young Ukrainian women wearing lycra, but I didn’t tell Igor Greenwald that.
I was pretty fit in those days and I couldn’t conceive of any aerobics or anything else physical a Ukrainian woman could do, that I wouldn’t be able to do on about one lung and without mobilizing much more than a quarter of my own muscle mass.
As I expected, the class was jammed with pretty Ukrainian girls who in most countries would be considered crazy to be trying to improve their figures, as pretty every woman of them was already better-looking than the European beauty queens at the Bingo disco.
After talking with the aerobics teacher, a little brunette named Elena, I took up my spot in the back of the classroom and got ready for an hour or so of watching these hot young ladies in pink and lime green and burgundy tights struggle at their leg lifts and sit ups, and wiggle their bottoms in the air, after which I would interview them and get a date with the pick of the litter.
What I did not bank on was that Elena was the all-Ukraine aerobics champion, male or female, and that I had invaded her master class, and that while they were willing to be polite they were not particularly impressed by an American man, just because of his passport.
It was the worst, most vicious, punishing physical training I ever went through, in my life, and I am a graduate of the U.S. Army paratrooper school. Elena knew physiology and made it a point to avoid upper body exercises, which are easier for men, just so I could fail at the overhead bicycles, leg lifts and crunches, which are harder. By the end I was wheezing, out of sync with all the girls, the only one in the room sweating, and fighting just to keep the motion going. The next day, for the first time in my life, I had to fight to stand up straight.
Shortly after it all began, but well after I had realized I was not nearly as clever as I thought I was, I perceived that one woman had arrived a little late and taken up a spot behind me. During the spinning and flipping and jumping I managed to see that she was if anything more gorgeous than the others. She had a great tan and long legs and hazel eyes and a waist that had to have been photo-shopped, except in those days Photoshop hadn’t been invented. I distinctly remember realizing this was a woman I would definitely ask out, except that I was making such a fool of myself that I never would because, well, her first impression of me was that I was an idiot foreign man in poor physical shape.
I later learned I took that woman’s reserved spot in the class and that, if anything, my actual first impression on her was worse than the one I thought I was making at the time.
That woman was, of course, my future wife. Now, 20 years later, we have a home and children and she still reminds me from time to time of my not-well-thought-through-theory that Ukrainian women are a weak sex that is easily impressed.
The actual article was kind of boring. But it was the best Kyiv Post story I ever did.
Stefan Korshak is an American citizen and former Kyiv Post staff writer for three years.
