"Nobody knows what's happening, so whatever you write people read very carefully," said Erlanger, adding that, on the contrary, "if you write a good story about a well-known topic in England, you don't change people's understanding of the country."
Before departing Moscow last Tuesday for a post as the newspaper's chief diplomatic correspondent, Erlanger had spent more than four years writing about everything from battles in Chechnya to the daily life of a Russian family for one of the world's best-known papers. He is being replaced as bureau chief by Alessandra Stanley and Michael Specter.
Before coming to Moscow with his wife, Elisabeth, Erlanger, an American from Connecticut worked 11 years for The Boston Globe. He covered the Iranian revolution, the Polish Solidarity movement, as well as about changes in the Soviet Union. In 1987 he joined The New York Times, becoming their correspondent for southeast Asia.
It was in Hong Kong that Erlanger wrote what he called one of the most influential stories of his career, about the plight of Burmese students. "It immediately got them a half a million dollars in American aid," said Erlanger, "because [New York Senator Daniel] Moynihan read it and got excited."
Since his early days in Moscow, Erlanger said foreign reporting has changed tremendously. Journalists then relied on telex machines for transmitting their stories, on their embassies for much information and on international telephone calls that took hours to place.
"Coverage of Moscow has become much more sophisticated," said Erlanger. "We are past the stage of being shocked that Russians wear trousers. Now we are spending a lot more time on more narrow issues, like what's happening in the coal industry, and are Jews not emigrating because they are happy here?"
But sophisticated stories do not always make for easy headlines, and the Moscow foreign press corps has largely painted a picture of Russia as the "lawless wild East," according to Erlanger. It is a portrayal with which he strongly disagrees. "I've tried to argue, rightly or wrongly, that crime in Russia is transitional. Personal crime is dropping. It went up in Russia as it did elsewhere in Eastern Europe with the collapse of the government. But Moscow is not a particularly unsafe city unless you're some banker driving a Mercedes 600."
Of the hundreds of interviews he has done, Erlanger said one of the most memorable was with General Dmitry Volkogonov, President Boris Yeltsin's former military adviser and an author-historian who died Tuesday at age 67.
"He was a real believer, and rose very high in the Soviet Army. When he began to have access to the archives, what he read shocked him and forced him to change his beliefs. Like very few people in the world, he was willing to let the evidence change his mind, and he became a very important figure in the reform movement. I regard him as one of those honorable people who was willing to go off into sort of an isolation against all the beliefs he grew up with and for this I admired him a lot."
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