SUFFOLK CLOSEUP - Been To Russia And I Won't Be Going Back

By Karl Grossman

In addition to being on Long Island all my working life as a journalist and later a journalism professor, too, I have spent considerable time in Russia.

But as Vladimir Putin grabbed more and more power and seized dictatorial rule, I wouldn’t go back there under any condition.

The brutal invasion of Ukraine that he has had Russia embark on and led, and his declaration as it began that if any nation “tries to impede us…the Russian response will be immediate and lead to consequences you have never seen in history”—a brazen threat of starting nuclear war—were not surprising to me.

My involvement in Russia came after I broke the story in The Nation magazine after the Challenger blew up in 1986 about how its next mission was to loft a space probe fueled with plutonium, the most lethal of all radioactive substances. If the explosion had happened then, four months later, and the plutonium dispersed, the impacts could have been horrendous. 

My follow-up writings on the use of nuclear power in space included authoring a book The Wrong Stuff, writing many articles and presenting TV programs.

Dr. Alexey Yablokov ( photo BBC News)And I was contacted by Dr. Alexey Yablokov, the most eminent environmentalist in Russia, the former environmental advisor to Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev. He was long concerned about the space nuclear activities of Russia and previously the Soviet Union. There were accidents like in the U.S. program including one in 1978 when a Cosmos satellite with a nuclear reactor crashed to Earth, breaking apart and spreading radioactive debris over 500 miles of northern Canada.

Yablokov, described in one publication when he died in 2017 as the “the towering grandfather of Russian ecology,” invited me to Russia to share information on the nuclear-in-space issue. 

There would be many visits—seven in all—and presentations including, in 1998, in Voronezh,  organized by Yablokov’s Center for Russian Environmental Policy on “Toward a Sustainable Russia: Environmental Policy;” speaking in 1999 at the “All-Russia Congress on Protection of Nature”—in a packed sports stadium along the Volga River in Saratov—and, in 2000, presenting at a conference on “Health of the Environment” at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

We became friends and Yablokov stayed with us at our home in Sag Harbor. He enjoyed this area and was intrigued by the Shinnecock Indian Nation. 

I found through the years that not just Yablokov but the many Russians I connected with were remarkably warm and friendly. The Putin reign is one thing; the Russian people another. 

My last presentation was a keynote speech, “Parallel Atomic Universes,” at a “Russian-American Women’s Leadership and Nuclear Safety Activism” conference in Tomsk in 2002. 

Putin had become prime minister in 1999. And things were changing—quickly. There was repression of the press and a takeover of media by Putin allies. As to environmental progress, a huge reversal has begun. As Yablokov said from the podium at a 1999 environmental conference in Moscow: “The result of Putin’s politics is fascism.”

In recent days, here in the U.S. and around the world, Putin has been compared to Hitler. The comparison is apt.

The last time I was with Yablokov was 15 years ago. 

We met in New York where he had come to participate in a conference at the UN about whales. The plight of whales and dolphins had been an early research subject for Yablokov. He would go on to write hundreds of articles as well as textbooks on biology and ecology.

When we met that last time, Yablokov had become leader of the Green Russia component of the Russian United Democratic Party and was also deputy chairman of the party—acronymed YABLOKO—which was challenging Putin. He told me of being followed and of living in an authoritarian state.

Russia has been a surprise for me. For example, Tomsk—which is in Siberia—looks like Vermont with streams flowing amid woods of white birch. And, as noted, the people I’ve met are lovely. 

But Putin, this Hitler-like former KGB colonel who has amassed a multi-billion ruble fortune in his rise to power, has brought Russia down—and if he is not stopped, what will he do to the world?

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.