A Breathtaking Global Tour and a Resignation - 7 January 2000

Just before Christmas the three main national television networks published their plans for covering New Year's Eve: they all promised to be unequalled in scope, in geographical range and altogether spellbinding.

The most ambitious plan appeared to be that of ABC - the American Broadcasting Company - which would have its alert and affable anchorman Peter Jennings in a specially-built studio in Times Square in front of a huge map of the world, slashed by a whole railing of vertical lines representing the time zones.

Mr Jennings would take us from the first glimmer of the New Year in a remote Pacific island and proceed to fade in effortlessly to, what was it, 40-50 countries and wind up, after America and Hawaii, at the last entry into the millennium - Samoa.

This show, it promised, would surpass anything ever seen on television or off it and there followed an interminable list of boastful figures - tens of thousands of electrical outlets, thousands of technicians, hundreds of correspondents - and on and on. It sounded awful.

It was, in the result, stunning. A global tour breathtaking in the varied beauty of midnight in every kind of landscape and latitude.

Not a hitch from the first tropical island, fade to New Zealand and Kiri Te Kanawa's glorious voice, on to Sydney and a team of men like agile spiders climbing the shell-like roofs of the Opera House.

Twelve hours later - I discovered I'd been sitting there so long - our minds were radiant with indelible images of the sound and light festivals of Tokyo, of Taiwan, of the Acropolis, the pyramids, flaming Moscow, the Eiffel Tower transformed into a fountain of light.

The sweep of this panorama, this unfolding picture of particular ways of expressing the - well, the general joy - was so embracing, so heartening that we didn't even notice there was no other news. Surely a unique feat.

At some point - I can't even remember when - it must have been mid afternoon, Peter Jennings threw in a note as casually as if he'd just thought that somebody might like to know the latest football score:

"Oh yes, by the way, Boris Yeltsin has resigned."

We took it in and let it go and woke up two days later like one of those old Hollywood actors famous for a delayed double take.

The first official response came, of course, from President Clinton. He stepped smartly in, doing his obvious duty, which was not to comment on the transition or the prospects of Mr Putin but to remind us of the bulky hero atop the tank - the man who would be forever remembered as the slayer of the Communist dragon and the begetter, the father, of something quite new to Russia: Russian democracy.

Next day the American Secretary of State, Mrs Albright, said it was reassuring to hear Mr Putin promise to continue the march - she might have said the limping stagger - towards freedom and democracy.

The one or two pundits who know something of Russia and its fractious empire were pleased to note that in last month's parliamentary elections Mr Putin's own party - the Unity Party - and one other had together reduced that menacing Communist majority.

For his part Mr Putin, having made the correct noises about freedom and democracy - after all who's against Santa Claus? - added a third bromide: Yes, he would co-operate closely with the West - except, he made very clear, on Chechnya - an internal matter the West had better keep its hands off.

Then, just as we were saying to ourselves: 'Well we don't know much about Mr Putin and apparently not too many Russians know much about him either. Yet all the signs point to a sympathetic and forceful new leader, young, decisive and in good health.'

Then we heard a single dissenting voice and unfortunately it is as authoritative a voice on Russia as any in this country. It is the voice of Professor Richard Pipes - Harvard's expert on the Soviet system and on Russia old and new.

He quoted two speeches, one a statement rather, that nobody else seems to have noticed or perhaps didn't care to notice.

One was a speech delivered two months ago. In it Mr Putin disclosed his prescription for the cure that every Russian cries out for - a positive improvement in Russia's invalid economy.

Mr Putin's recipe: increase military spending by 57%.

Dr Pipes calls this "bizarre" when you consider that the Russian economy was ruined by runaway military expenditure.

But apparently that's not the thing most to fear with Mr Putin's arrival in the Kremlin. It's an unreported speech he made to celebrate the anniversary of Lenin's creation of, wait for it, the first Soviet secret police.

I don't recall ever having heard or read of any Soviet or Russian official ever in public praising the institution which alone for 70 years guaranteed Communism's survival through - as Dr Pipes puts it - the indispensable instruments of terror that deprived millions of Soviet citizens of their lives and liberties and kept the rest in constant fear.

From the beginning in 1917 and on till the end of 1991 this secret force was known successively as the Cheka, the OGPU, the NKVD and the KGB. Mr Putin praised them one by one.

Now this, in the context of diplomacy, of the relations between Russia and the democratic West, is an act of astonishing audacity.

I recall, from my days covering the United Nations, that Soviet delegates if ever they were asked to comment on the role of the secret police, they either turned away having heard a more interesting bit of dialogue nearby or they promptly denied any such institution existed or, like the grand survivor Mr Gromyko, they accepted your challenge as a well known boring bit of banter - a Western obsession - and they'd say: "So? We have the NKVD, you have the president's secret service."

And I do believe that among the gullible, not only American Communists and fellow travellers but many liberals, this ludicrous equation - Russian secret police = American secret service, whose single job is the physical protection of the president - this was readily accepted and parroted among the faithful.

But I don't remember Mr Andropov (he was the one with two great hobbies - the KGB and American jazz), Mr Andropov never pretended it didn't exist.

And the misgiving that some of us always had about Mr Gorbachev was that he was Andropov's closest friend and for 17 years could hardly help knowing that OGPU, NKVD, KGB were the literal symbols of arrest, exile, slave labour, torture and death.

This speech of Mr Putin it's quite clear was sincere and deliberate. It followed, I believe, on a statement he put out on an internet site - a government internet site - which made brutally clear, in retrospect, just how far he means to continue, as Secretary Albright said, along the path of freedom and democracy.

In December Mr Putin said quite firmly that Western democracy is not for Russia.

"Russia is not ready" he wrote, "to abandon traditional dependence on the state and become a society of self-reliant individuals.

"Russian society," he wrote, "needs to restore the guiding and regulatory rule of the state."

Did he mean to regulate the stock market or bank deposits? What he was saying was: "Long live the KGB."

We have been warned.

There was during the long euphoric symphony of ABC's tour of the globe a minor theme that from time to time rose up and piped a querulous note in the midst of the rockets and the odes to joy.

It was the question of how are we doing with Y2K? And as you might have guessed on a programme that started at the International Dateline and had the millennium coming in while most of us were snoozing, reassurance was swift and blessed.

First New Zealand, then Australia with the myriad lights flashing alongside the seascapes, and there obviously no snag, no glitch, no sweat. And so it went.

The first hint of big trouble came from Paris about five hours before France's midnight: the Eiffel Tower clock had stopped and the generator that would fire the 20,000 fireworks was stuck.

The American lady reporter announced this snag with professional glee like somebody who'd scored a scoop but by the time they'd got to her at midnight all was well, and the Eiffel Tower's vast explosive curtain of light was glorious.

When it was all over we came to Washington and the headquarters of the president's commission on Y2K that was set up two years ago. The head man said, with a gladsome grin, that all was well - no glitch either major or, so far as they could see, minor.

This was a domestic assurance simply for, as I say, hours and hours ago we'd learned that across the whole 11 time zones of Russia and its empire there'd been no reported loss of power, light, public services.

If remote villages on the Pacific shore and big towns in the Caucuses and Ukraine were OK surely all would be well in Chipping Campden and Paradise, Pennsylvania.

And so all was until 4 January when the Assistant Secretary of Defence came on the tube and said that, on New Year's Eve, the Pentagon went into a bad night. There was a blackout of all information from spy satellites over Russia. It took two days to fix.

If he'd been called to the tube on New Year's Eve he said he certainly would have denied anything was wrong. Quite right.

How about your government departments? There must have been snags, glitches everywhere and at this moment frantic officials are saying: "Shhh" and busy fixing them.

I know one thing: I was a victim. On Tuesday 4 January I took out my camera, looked at the date - it had gone over to 01.04.00 - good all was well.

I released the close-up lens, I pressed the button, there was a continuous sizzling sound and then plop, it stopped. The date had whizzed back to a single zero and now nothing works.

I'm going to send it back to the manufacturer and ask them what they think they were doing on New Year's Eve, probably watching Peter Jennings and saying: "Everything is A-OK."

Well they'll pay for this. I hope.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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