Sinophile recalls fine romance

Throughout five decades in journalism, Russian Vsevolod Ovchinnikov's life has been intertwined with China's history.

Ovchinnikov experienced what he calls the golden years of China's communist revolution, witnessed the early years of Japan's economic take-off in the 1960s and the political landscape in Britain before Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979. But most painful of all, he witnessed Russia's downfall in the 1990s.

'I would like to return to 1991 so we [Russia] could start all over again,' said Ovchinnikov, 74, in Taipei last week after attending the inauguration of President Chen Shui-bian.

Ovchinnikov was awarded a medal for his bravery fighting in World War II, although he said he 'had not hit a single German tank'. Then he was assigned to the Moscow School of Oriental Studies, where he learned Chinese - and started almost two decades of involvement with Chinese affairs.

He was posted to Beijing in 1953 for Pravda, the then-Soviet national daily. For six years he interviewed numerous Chinese officials and visited Tibet twice - interviewing the Dalai Lama before Tibet's spiritual leader fled to India in 1959. He sat through meetings between Soviet leaders such as Nikita Khrushchev and the late chairman Mao Zedong.

Luckily for Ovchinnikov, his romance with China temporarily ended in 1959 before Mao plunged the country into a series of disastrous political movements, from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution.

Ovchinnikov's own nightmare began when he returned to the Soviet Union in the 1980s when the country was on the threshold of revolutionary change. From Mikhail Gorbachev to Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin, Ovchinnikov said the country had fallen from being a superpower to a 'banana republic without bananas'.