A flashback to Moscow in 1991

On the eve of the Soviet Union's demise, my guide to the USSR's capital city for western journalists

While culling through old files recently, looking for blasts from the past, I came across a little booklet I published for CNN colleagues who were traveling to Moscow for the first time to cover a 1991 Summit meeting between U.S. President George H. W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The summit was held in early 1991, the last before the collapse of the USSR. In August, 1991, Gorbachev barely survived a political coup (with the help of the United States), and by the end of the same year, Gorbachev had resigned office and the Soviet Union was gone.

Reading my “travel handbook” today is a reflection on how far Russia has come since the end of the Cold War… but not necessarily always in a good way.

Remember that in early 1991, only a relatively few Americans had been able to visit Moscow; the Cold War’s hostilities had prevented widespread tourism. This long-outdated booklet is filled with observations small and large for CNN staffers making their first visit.

You can view it as a PDF here, or by clicking the cover image below.

For anyone interested, I published this internal booklet using my home computer and some powerful pre-Microsoft publishing software called “FullWrite,” which despite its power never survived against software created by Adobe, Microsoft and a few others. It was printed on a dot matrix printer at the highest resolution possible at the time. An earlier version of this booklet was distributed to CNN staff before the historic 1988 Moscow Summit between Gorbachev and President Reagan.