Корреспондент Christian Science Monitor вспоминает события августовского путча 1991 года в СССР

Loading... ‘Desperate men in desperate times’: Reporting on Russia’s failed August coup of 1991 Dan Sneider was the Monitor’s Moscow correspondent when Soviet hard-liners grabbed Mikhail Gorbachev and set off political counterforces just months before the U.S.S.R.’s dissolution. His reports on the event’s fallout appeared in the paper and on Monitor Radio. Dan joined us on a special, throwback edition of our podcast to reminisce about the work. In Russia, “nothing ever happens in August.” It was something Dan Sneider, in his old role as the Monitor’s Moscow correspondent, had heard often. The year 1991 proved the adage to be very much untrue. Kremlin hard-liners detained the reform-minded Mikhail Gorbachev at his dacha in Crimea on Aug. 18 and set off days of uncertainty. When the news broke, Dan was at his family’s summer place in Vermont, on a U.S. trip to get visa papers for his newborn son. He made his way back to Russia. At the airport in Moscow, Dan found his normally stoic driver animated and full of questions. He saw signs of mounting political and public pushback against the hard-liners’ attempted coup, which was already crumbling. Dan got back to work, he recalls on our “Why We Wrote This” podcast – speaking, as it happens, from that same Vermont house. He was well positioned to write, and to report for the hosts at Monitor Radio, then the paper’s audio outlet. “I think anybody who was inside, who had traveled enough and reported enough to feel what was bubbling up everywhere, was not surprised in that sense,” Dan says. “I mean, I can’t say that I predicted the coup, but saw something coming.” This special episode of our podcast includes archival Monitor Radio audio that was digitally preserved by the American Archive of Public Broadcasting through a grant from the Mellon Foundation. Dan talks about his dispatches. He listens and reacts to some of his 1991 radio reports, recounting moments from his reporting 35 years ago that hint at stories to come, from places like Crimea and Ukraine. Now a lecturer at Stanford, he talks about the enduring power of Monitor journalism. “The skills that I learned as a Monitor journalist have stood me in great stead,” Dan says, “because it’s really about analysis, thoughtful analysis based on actual reporting, and fact.” Episode transcript Monitor Radio: This is Monitor Radio. I’m Dale Willman. Communist Party hardliners have removed Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev from power. The first official announcement of that action came on Monday in the Soviet Union and said the 60-year-old Gorbachev, who has led the country for six years, could no longer rule because of unspecified health reasons. Later, the group involved in the action said they took the drastic measures because they were trying to prevent a national catastrophe. Gorbachev has been replaced by Vice President Gennady Yanayev. Correspondent Justin Burke is in Moscow…. Clay Collins: That report, from The Christian Science Monitor’s then radio arm, marked the start of coverage of the August coup attempt of 1991, in which Kremlin hardliners detained Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who was summering at his dacha down on the Crimean Peninsula. You might best remember Mr. Gorbachev in the context of U.S. President Reagan’s demand that he tear down the Berlin Wall. That Reagan speech was in 1987, two years before the wall did fall. Mr. Gorbachev had, of course, already shown himself to be a reformer, using terms like “glasnost” (or openness) and “perestroika” (for economic restructuring), beginning all the way back in 1985, right after he got the job of general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. But things really got going 35 years ago this month, and by Christmas of 1991, the Soviet Union and its government would dissolve. I’m Clay Collins. This is a special throwback edition of “Why We Wrote This.” Joining me today is Dan Sneider, now a lecturer in international policy at Stanford University. But Dan, back in 1991, was the Monitor’s Moscow correspondent. Among other stories he delivered in the days right after the coup, Dan wrote an insightful one headlined, “Soviet Coup Long Time in Making.” His lead sentence: “Moscow’s midnight coup was an act by desperate men in desperate times.” We’ll be talking about that story and sharing more of the recently recovered archival audio that prompted this episode, including some featuring … Dan Sneider. Hey, Dan. Dan Sneider: Nice to be with you, Clay. Clay Collins: So we’ll get into this great archival radio sound that we’re hearing in a bit because it very much does not sound like podcasting does today. And in fact, maybe radio is starting to sound more like podcasting. But I want to start first with a neat bit of symmetry. Gorbachev was arrested at his country place, and you were on vacation at your own family dacha in Vermont, which happens to be where you’re joining me from today. So I know there’s a story behind why you were so far away from Moscow when the biggest story on your beat broke. Do you wanna walk us through that? Sneider: I don’t think I’ve ever lived that one down among some fellow correspondents at The Christian Science Monitor. But, you know, [what was] always the truism of Soviet and Russian life was nothing ever happens in August. All the big events, the revolutions, everything happens in the winter when things are really dark and desperate. In the summer, everybody in Russia goes off to the dacha, and I too was off to the dacha. But in this case also because, my first son had been born just a couple of months before in California, and I came back to recover my wife and son and head back to Moscow. And we were sitting literally at the lake here in Vermont when the coup took place. And I had two problems. One was it was very hard to find an airplane that was going back into Moscow right after the coup, and the other was that I didn’t have a visa for my son. In any case, the first story I wrote, I wrote literally from this spot. And it was based heavily on what I already understood was going on after, you know, more than a year, year and a half of covering the Soviet Union. I think I had a pretty good sense of the dynamic of events that led to this coup. And you know, eventually I made it back to Moscow by the end of the week, but at the time when the coup was just collapsing. Collins: Right. You told me, Dan, a little bit about how Justin Burke held the fort in Moscow and [you] mentioned a bunch of other Monitor people, some of whom are still around at the Monitor, some of whom recently left. We still have Linda Feldmann. We still have Howard LaFranchi. It’s really fun to see their bylines looking back at [newspaper clips from] this period. You also told me about your encounter when you got back to Moscow with Sasha, a longtime Monitor driver and guide, and [how] he had a very different demeanor when he picked you up. It wasn’t just complaints about the car and gas, as you told me. He suddenly had political opinions. Can you take us back to that ride? Sneider: Well, in the Soviet Union in those days, all of our assistants, all the people who worked for us, the driver, the people who kept the house, the assistants in the news bureau... And remember, The Christian Science Monitor has had a bureau in Moscow going back to the pre-war days, pre-World War II days. We have a long-established presence there. And that apartment where Monitor correspondents lived was one that my predecessors had lived in many times over. And Sasha, the driver, was assigned to us by an agency of the Soviet government – which we knew was, in fact, the KGB. All of our staff were. And, I think Elizabeth Pond, who … Beb Pond, who was one of the great Monitor correspondents in Moscow, I think she even mentions Sasha in one of her books. You know, as far as I knew, Sasha was a former Red Army truck driver, a stolid sort of what the Russians call a “muzhik,” you know, a real guy. I never heard a single political view from him ever. It was all about what to keep the car running, you know, through those long Russian winters. And he picked us up at the airport, just as I said, as the coup was just crumbling. [Boris] Yeltsin had stood up to the coup makers, literally stood on the tank in front of the Soviet parliament and led the resistance to the coup. And we got in the car, my wife, little baby, and I, and Sasha is bubbling over with political views. “What’s going on? What does it mean? What does it…” I was stunned. And I wouldn’t realize at that point that the real, you know, the fact that the Russian people had stood up in resistance to the Soviet state, what remained of the power of the Soviet state, had lifted the sort of, you know, burden of fear and the kind of sense of terror which all Russians maybe to this day still have somewhere in the back of their heads, that would prevent them from saying anything but what they really believed. You know, people in Russia used to talk about, you know, where you really said what you thought was in the kitchen. It was kitchen talk. So, that was my first glimpse that something profound had changed in Russia. Collins: And it strikes me that that’s a pretty traditional and time-honored information pipeline for journalists, right? It’s the driver, the government minder, the fixer. Even though you know they’re keeping tabs on you, they’re also, in their own way, you know – some intentionally and some not – sort of bellwethers. And, you know, it struck me, too. I was a young staff editor at another Monitor legacy product at the time: the monthly World Monitor magazine. We ran a story in October by Sovietologist Marshall Goldman on the defeat of the junta. He called it “Three Days That Shook My World” in a nod to the John Reed book about the Bolshevik Revolution. And you know, one thing he said – he remarked on something very similar. It chimed when you told me about Sasha initially, and that is, you know, this was the end of Soviet rule in the making, and fear was eroding, and there was public elation much more so than chaos. Did there start to be – besides hearing from your driver – did there start to be some vox pop? Were you hearing from people on the street in ways that you never had? Sneider: Absolutely. I think... And that … already had begun, particularly amongst the sort of Moscow intelligentsia,… who took advantage of the reforms under Gorbachev, particularly glasnost – openness – to start to talk more openly. So it wasn’t that new in that sense, but amongst ordinary people, absolutely. And I think that, you know, I have a very strong feeling about what Russians were like when they were liberated from the oppression of the state. And there is such a great diversity of opinion and thought within Russia, and I keep that in my mind even when I look at today’s Russia and we see this, again, an oppressive state. And I always believe that, you know, behind closed doors, Russians are having a lively discussion about what’s going on, including the war in Ukraine. That’s a kind of a lesson I learned in the streets of Moscow in those days. Collins: Yeah. So then and now, you had the very human stories, the ones that reporters use to kind of bring home and make relatable political stories. And then there’s the straight political reporting on what might come next right away, and then even beyond the brief Yeltsin era. As you’ve noted when we’ve talked, The Monitor was doing analytical journalism on top of straight reports before that became the norm. Part of that was a consequence of an editorial philosophy we have, which is to go deeper and look for a deeper meaning, and part of it is just simply how we’re distributed, which is via the U.S. Mail, which introduces delivery time, and so … “second-day analysis.” That print story of yours that I mentioned was so tight and coherent and writerly. You used the phrase “gray-faced soldiers of the state,” which I thought was very evocative. And you’re doing radio work too, and we’ll talk a little bit more about what’s different about the two different mediums. But on the political reporting, let’s listen together now to about 50 seconds of one of your reports in the days immediately after. Monitor Radio: Everybody recognizes that the old centralized union has to go, that there’s gonna have to be something along the lines of a loose confederation to replace it, maybe with the republics bound principally by an economic agreement sort of like the European Common Market, but having, but basically being politically separate states, uh, and with the center controlling a minimal of functions like defense and, and, uh, nuclear weapons strategy and so on. The failed coup, the political revolution that’s taken place in Russia has just unleashed, uh, tremendous forces, including the nationalist forces that were already at work in these republics. So what [Anatoly] Sobchak [the elected mayor of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, and a prominent reformist leader] is saying is, “let’s try and calm things down, let’s move to where people want to go and try and preserve as much of the union as we can in the process.” Collins: Dan, first of all, what’s it like hearing that after, presumably, 35 years? Sneider: Well, it’s a real flashback. I mean, you know, I always tell people that I had a long life in journalism and a lot of it with The Monitor and elsewhere. And I had no experience that could compare in intensity and in just the sheer sense of being a witness to history to my four years in Moscow. And it sort of comes back to me, listening to that. I also… Why I said, in that story about this coup being long in the making, is that we correspondents who were sitting in Moscow had already a pretty clear idea going back to the previous fall in December that Gorbachev – who has, you know, who was long celebrated in the West and beloved in the West, but not so celebrated and beloved inside the Soviet Union – was in retreat with pressure from the forces of reaction and the forces that wanted to end this experiment in reform. And I think the clearest signal we got was the repression of the revolts in the Baltic republics, early in that year in 1991, led by the KGB, and the KGB forces, and the military. And Gorbachev was no friend to the rising nationalism that we saw throughout the Soviet Union. In my time in Moscow, I made it a point to get out, to go around. I went to all but one of the 15 republics. Moldova was the only one I never made it to. And I interviewed the heads of state of all of those republics as well as traveling widely through there, and I understood pretty early on that this was an empire: not just a country, a nation. Russia may be a nation, but the Soviet Union was an empire. It was the reformed version of the Russian Empire, and the empire was in revolt everywhere. And, Gorbachev … wanted to keep the Soviet Union together. He was never a friend of this kind of nationalist revolt. He yielded to those forces in the Soviet Union that wanted … who’d do anything to keep it together. And that was a clear indication to not only me, but to others who were there that this situation was headed in a dark direction. I can recall a breakfast I had somewhere: February, somewhere around there in the depths of winter. It’s always Russia. It’s always dark, uh, it seems. And we were in the basement of the American Embassy, me and a couple other correspondents, and we were talking to a couple of visiting US congressmen. One of them was [Stephen] Solarz, who was a very prominent figure in the House of Representatives on foreign policy. And this was after the events in Lithuania and Latvia, and he had the view, I think like many people in Washington did, that we had all our money on Gorbachev. Gorbachev was doing the things that we wanted him to do globally and so on, and they didn’t like Yeltsin much. Yeltsin had emerged as the leader of Russia, but he was unstable. You know, he had an alcohol problem. No one knew where he was gonna take things. And Solarz turned to us and he said, “So let me ask you: Gorbachev, part of the problem or part of the solution?” And I think we all looked at each other and kind of smiled, and we all said, “Part of the problem.” I mean, we knew that this thing was unraveling, and what really propelled the coup, and that’s what I wrote in that piece, was this deadline that was looming over the Soviet state. And that was on August 20th … [that] was to be the signing of a so-called new union treaty, a new treaty governing the relationship amongst all the republics. And this was really spearheaded by Yeltsin in, from Russia, [Leonid] Kravchuk in Ukraine, the Balts, others who wanted to basically reform at, at the beginning just to reform the Soviet Union to basically give more autonomy and independence to the republics. And Gorbachev was being pressured heavily to sign that treaty, and the meeting was to take place on August 20th. That was the deadline for this coup, and I think anybody who was inside, who had traveled enough and reported enough to feel what was bubbling up everywhere was not surprised in that sense. I mean, I can’t say that I predicted the coup, but I saw something coming. And at the point I wrote that piece, which was before the coup had completely collapsed, I felt things were...that it was falling apart very quickly. But no one was sure, because the leadership of the coup – which included, by the way, the chief of the KGB, [Vladimir] Kryuchkov, who was a nasty man, as well as the defense minister and others – they still had the instruments of power, of terror, in their hands. But in the end, they were defeated by a popular uprising, which was an amazing event. We should still look back and say, “that’s a Russia we should remember is still there somewhere.” Collins: Hmm. There’s a prescience that you’re talking about that is really earned by, you know, stacking these observational months and years and weeks. I wanna talk a little more about attention to nuance as a guiding approach. I know it’s another Monitor hallmark. This story was obviously a lot bigger than hardliners versus Gorbachev. It wasn’t some clear “triumph of democracy” story, as you’ve said. There were all these intricate pieces to it. And yet there’s a competition to break these stories. Still, your work has to have some reportorial restraint, and I’d like to talk about that. How do you keep looking at the intricacy of loyalties and constitutional uncertainties and signs of new emerging nationalities, [that I think] you’re seeing? And you’re writing about possibility, not inevitability, but how do you avoid the trap of trying to make proclamations as a journalist when you’re reporting in a moment like this? Sneider: Well, as you said before, the Monitor in some ways was a unique institution, particularly at that time, because we had these early deadlines. And in Moscow, that meant that my story had to be filed by 4:00 in the afternoon, [that] was the absolute deadline. So often I was writing in the midst of a stream of events, and I had to take a leap and try and look ahead, write the second-day story on the first day, ‘cause I was competing with people who had eight more hours in the day at least to follow events. So we were compelled in a way to take an analytical approach to try and get beyond the immediate news. At the same time, we did a lot of just straight-up news reporting. And I always felt like, you know, we could hold our own against everybody pretty much. But as I said, I think that it forced you to sort of think, “Well, what does this mean?” Okay, here’s an event. You can report an event. This happened. Forces moved here. Someone said this. But what does it mean? And for that, there’s two things. One is you have to have done enough reporting that you feel confident to make a judgment, and that’s a tough thing for any journalist or for that matter, I have been in academia for a while, for academics sometimes face this problem as well. So you have to learn to sometimes trust your own judgment. And sometimes you don’t know, you can’t know, and you have to sort of avoid making judgments. But I think that the Monitor was always about understanding events. Not, you know, it’s always…we don’t want the heat. We don’t want just the heat of the event. We want to understand what’s really going on. And that’s a tension in journalism always between, you know, “just the facts, ma’am,” and leaning out a little forward to say, “Well, here, here’s what I think.” And I think we were very careful, always, in the Monitor in those days, we avoided the personal pronoun. It was never about me, never about the reporter. And I sort of still hold that principle of journalism deeply in my mind. I’m a little uncomfortable with the personalization of journalism that we see today. It’s not about you, but it is about you in the sense that you bring to whatever story you’re doing, you know, the depth of knowledge of history and so on. People have…sometimes, students or whatever ask me, “What’s the best preparation for being a journalist, particularly for being a foreign correspondent?” I say, “History. Study history.” A little bit of literature is not a bad idea as well. And that’s why it’s valuable to be in a place for a while. Frankly, it’s also valuable to have been in different places. I reported from many different places over my career in journalism, and having that comparative perspective can actually enrich and deepen your reporting. Collins: Right. “Light not heat” is the shorthand that I’ve heard used to describe the Monitor approach, when you were talking about it earlier. And you know, it stood out to me that you were being authoritative in that clip, but not out and out predictive, which I think is really interesting. It’s archive-dive time again. We pulled another short clip. Let’s listen to this one. Monitor Radio: Today, Russia and the Ukraine forged an agreement. What are the ramifications of that deal? Well, I think it’s probably gonna turn out to be a somewhat temporary, uh, sort of crisis measure because the tensions between the Ukraine and Russia were rising very rapidly after the Ukrainians declared independence last week, and the Russians in turn issued a statement saying that if the Ukraine seceded, then the question of borders between the two republics would have to be taken up, that there were parts of the Ukraine, such as the Crimea, which is a Russian area that was given to the Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1954, that, that would have to be returned. But I think, uh, you know, this is an attempt to, to cool things out temporarily and to at least have a commitment to some type of interim, uh, inter-republican administration in the transition to whatever, uh, the Soviet Union is going to become. Collins: Really interesting. It feels like a history lesson and, you know, Ukraine, Crimea, places with obviously a lot of brand new history. Um, you know, by ‘99 we’d have Vladimir Putin, um, still in power [today], and there’s so much in motion then that would take decades to actually unspool. So can you talk a little about the then and now of this? When you flash back to reporting on this coup, how many of the preconditions, uh, were you seeing, not only for the fact that the pushback was too much even for Soviet tanks to put down then, but also for the kind of regional social evolution that would keep on coming and is still coming today? Sneider: Well, listening to that, I’m thinking…well, that was fairly prescient. You know, I spent a lot of time in Ukraine for a variety of reasons. One of which is that I am a Ukrainian Jew in origin and I literally visited my grandfather’s birthplace in central Ukraine and my wife had a lot of family in Ukraine. We went to Kyiv very early on to visit our relatives and it gave you a little special window when you’re talking to your own family members. And I remember driving around Kyiv the first time I was there, which was before all of these events and there’s a big monument that had been… It’s like an arch, sort of like [St. Louis’ Gateway Arch], that was erected on the banks of the Dnieper River in Kyiv and when I was driving around with my wife’s cousin and he... You know, that the arch was, was created to commemorate the unity of Ukraine and Russia, which is for Russians, you know, Ukraine is really, you know … particularly Putin says that’s … that’s the birthplace of Russia. And he said, “We Ukrainians call that the yoke.” So I thought, “Ah, OK. There’s something going on here.” So I understood fairly early on that the Ukrainians were not the Russians. Yes, amongst the republics, the Slavic republics, that is Ukraine, Byelorussia [now known as Belarus], were the trusted ones. But even there the fires of nationalist revolt were already visible. And I spent a lot of time, as I said, watching the emergence of the popular front movements in all these republics and certainly in Ukraine, leading up to the plebiscite that was held on independence which was a dramatic event. I’m fairly convinced and I think a wonderful Ukrainian American historian, Serhii Plokhy, has written a book about this that really was the drive for Ukrainian independence that really triggered the collapse of the Soviet Union. So the Russians could tolerate maybe losing the Balts, maybe losing the Caucuses or whatever it is, but they couldn’t tolerate losing Ukraine, and that’s still true today. And if you look back at Putin’s long essay that he wrote in the summer of 2021 preceding the attack on Ukraine in 2022, he lays out this view of history which says, “No, there is no separate country, Ukraine. There’s just one Rus,” you know? And that view, and of course we saw it in the sort of seizure of Crimea in 2013-2014. But, if you had a sense of history, you knew that this was in some sense, this was a conflict waiting to happen even then. This is…we’re talking about, you know, in the early ‘90s. I should say as a personal note, my oldest son, the one who was born just before the coup, returned to Russia as a correspondent, and was a correspondent for The Economist magazine, and he covered the war in Ukraine from his early days. He spent time in Kyiv and in Moscow, and speaks very good Russian, which he learned as a little boy in Moscow. We talk all the time and I’m always remembering, you know, that these things have a history. They have a depth to them. And if you simply are just picking on the surface of events, you’ll never get it. And I think Russia’s one of those places, [the] Soviet Union’s one of those places where you really need to have – as I said it before but I’ll say it again – you need to have history deep in your brain in order to appreciate what’s going on. Collins: Deep-seated perspectives coming to fruition decades on. We’ve just talked about how it doesn’t necessarily make sense to be predictive, in journalism. But that being said, can I put you on the spot and get your assessment of where you think Russia-Ukraine is going to go? Sneider: Well, I think about this a lot. I am one of those people who I wake up in the morning and I, frankly, I read the Ukraine news before I read the news from Michigan or something like that. You know, I am a great admirer of the strength and resilience of the Ukrainian people in fending off this massive Russian invasion. It’s a testament to both their passion for their country, and that’s really important. And, you know, there’s always this image of the Ukrainian peasant. Russians used to have this kind of slightly derisive view of Ukrainians as sort of stolid peasants, you know? But they have a kind of a capacity to take on this kind of struggle that you don’t see in very many people. I mean, I’m pretty confident the Ukrainians will never surrender. I don’t know whether the Russians can accept what would be a de facto political defeat, maybe not a full-scale military defeat, but a political defeat. And I’m always watching to see the signs of trouble inside Russia. Frankly, my son thinks I’m a little bit too optimistic in this regard. But I have a feeling, and I still have lots of friends and contacts and with people in that part of the world, that, of course, underneath that surface of calm and loyalty to the Russian regime, there’s a lot more going on, and we see signs of it here and there. We won’t know. And then it reminds me again of this, of the days of the Soviet Union. We didn’t... You know, Sasha didn’t speak until, you know, until he saw the tanks in retreat. So, who knows? I hope for change, that the product of this war will be change within Russia, a return maybe more to a Russia that wants to be part of the Western world, wants to be part of Europe. And I think that that’s a goal that we should all seek, not only for the sake of the Ukrainians and others who feel threatened by a kind of revanchist Russian regime, but also for the Russian people themselves. I mean, these are beautiful, wonderful people with a rich history and intellectual legacy. I mean, I’ll never stop reading Russian literature. It’s a sort of a guidepost for me. But somewhere that Russia needs to come back to the surface again, and … somewhere along the line, I am not gonna predict when I believe that will happen. Collins: Of course, so much comes down now to personality politics and on the world stage and who the different actors are and what their personal agendas might be. I want to pivot. We’re near the end now. I want to talk a little bit more about process and multimedia reporting, which you did there and elsewhere, and kind of how you made the most of each medium. I mean, the print newspaper offers column inches. It’s a great space to do synthesis. Radio in smaller chunks gives you a chance to do that, but also to put listeners on the scene. It’s more intimate. That’s sort of the value of audio. What did you most like doing, and how did all of that work logistically? And I’m taking notes because we’re doing a lot of this balancing now in the field. Sneider: Well, in those days, of course, The Monitor had embarked upon a multimedia approach, radio and then television, and of course, the print publication. I did a little bit of television. I did a lot of radio. I actually loved radio. I always found...I used to tell people that pieces that I did for the radio got far more reaction than the things I did in print. I think that’s because people hear the voice of the reporter. They can connect to the person behind the story. It gives it a kind of, you know, vibrancy for readers, for listeners that print alone doesn’t have. Now, the watchword in those days was synergy. And I remember some people in Monitor leadership who said, “Well, this’ll work perfectly. We’ll have synergy. You can report a story and then have it exist in several different mediums.” Well, it turned out it was a lot more difficult to do that than it sounds like. Because sound, radio, you’re thinking when you go out to report a story, you have to think about the sound. You have to get those little bits, the actualities we used to call the background sounds and so on. So the way you report actually is quite different than the way you report for print. I mean, you know, yes, you still have your notebook out or your tape recorder and your pen… That part of reporting, listening, talking, watching, is true for all these. But the way you construct a story is different. Television, of course, is a whole another creature. So I like the idea of multiple approaches. I see the, you know, the podcasting world, the way it’s proliferating. But I think in the end, the requirements of journalism are not the same. In some ways, I don’t think they ever can… I mean, I think, you know, it’s easier to go print to radio than any other transition because you can sort of... You can always talk, you know? And I did a lot of what we in those days in Monitor radio used to call two-ways. Basically, you know, “Hey, Dan, what’d you see?” But I’m a fan of all mediums, although I have to admit, least of all television. Collins: It’s interesting. The more things change, the more they stay the same. We’re now, you know, encouraging writers in the field to think about things like what we’re calling external audio and supplemental audio. And we’re looking at things like – not a “pivot to video,” I think that’s been widely maligned in our industry – but yes, two-minute video explainers on vertical video that do really well on social media. We’ve had some success with those. So it’s evolving. It’s just really interesting to be talking to you about the history of it and see what the similarities are. Sneider: I’m not sure I would survive as a journalist in today’s environment. It’s a lot more work, by the way. I’ve a lot of friends who are still out there in the field. They said, “I’m back to being a wire reporter. I’m on 24 hours a day.” So, you know, they’re not always happy about it. Collins: You might be surprised how well you fit in today. I wanna let you go soon, but I have just two more questions that are kind of intertwined. How do you use what you know about journalism in general, and maybe Monitor journalism specifically in your new work lecturing in international relations? And, do you miss being a Monitor reporter? Sneider: Well, I always miss being a Monitor reporter. And I still have good friends at The Monitor, and I’m a subscriber and a reader. I believe in Monitor journalism. It still has great relevance and importance in the sort of scattered media landscape that we live in. Well, you know, I’ve been in academia for, oh, 20 years now, both as an administrator of a research center on Asia and the Pacific – I ended up spending a lot of my time in that part of the world – and now mostly teaching. I love teaching. And I’m still writing. So I do a lot of commentary and analysis on current events, particularly in Northeast Asia, China, Korea, Japan. I’m actually right now working on a piece about North Korea’s relations with Russia. And I have several places that I publish in regularly, including in Japanese news magazines, ‘cause I like to speak to the audience outside of the United States. And I find that the skills that I learned as a Monitor journalist have stood me in great stead because it’s really about analysis, thoughtful analysis based on actual reporting and fact. And for a while, when I was working for the San Jose Mercury News, and I was a columnist for Knight Ridder news service, and I wrote an opinion column on sort of foreign policy issues. And one of the things I learned there was how to write short, write to a very fixed length. And I said to myself, “Well, I don’t wanna write an opinion column that’s just, ‘oh, here’s what Dan Sneider thinks about this.’” I always felt I needed to go out and do reporting, that whatever analysis or commentary I made had to be based on reportage. And that’s something that was drilled into me from the Monitor. And I really dislike this – as I said, I think I dislike the kind of, “oh, it’s all about you,” the sort of personalization of journalism. I find that uncomfortable, maybe sometimes just almost distasteful, ‘cause it doesn’t matter who I am. [This] only matters: Am I a competent judge and [a] person who has the ability to make a sound analysis of something that you may wanna read? Collins: Hmm. Short, keeping personality out of it, being analytical. I mean, all these things you are hitting on are very much in vogue. I wouldn’t – I’m not gonna raise .. AI with you at all because I think that’ll be a dead end. I know what you’d say about it, probably. But, I wanna thank you very much for being out there, for being willing to call in from your dacha in Vermont. Which, you know, I still think it’s remarkable that that’s where you were roughly 35 years ago this week, on the phone and with Monitor people, and it’s just been so great to catch up with you. Sneider: Oh, it’s been terrific. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. As I said, I remain a loyal Monitor reader and Monitor supporter, and it’s a standard of journalism everybody should aspire to. Collins: Thanks, Dan. And thanks to our listeners. You can find more in our show notes, including more audio and some vintage newspaper screenshots, along with a monthly magazine cover shot in our transcript. I’m Clay Collins. This episode was produced by Mackenzie Farkus. Jingnan Peng is also a producer on this show. Our sound engineer was Alyssa Britton. Our original music is by Noel Flatt. Our audio archivist was Greg Fitzgerald. Produced in Boston by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2026.