Peter Hitchens Reflects on 50 Years in Journalism
by Jonathon Van Maren, European Conservative:
In the early morning of January 13, 1991, thousands of Lithuanians in the capital of Vilnius converged on the TV Tower. On March 11, 1990, Lithuania had become the first Soviet republic to declare independence from Moscow; Mikhail Gorbachev demanded that they renounce it. On March 17, the Lithuanians refused. KGB troops were sent in to quash the rebellion. As protestors surrounded the TV Tower, tanks drove into the crowds and the KGB opened fire. Fourteen people were killed; hundreds wounded. One of the journalists in Vilnius that night was Peter Hitchens. Witnessing history, he recalled, was one thing—getting the news to readers was another.
“The night after the Vilnius massacre, we were all trying to get copy out about what had happened,” he recounted. “The only telephones from which you could reach Moscow were in the Parliament building, which had been taken over by nationalist rebels who were convinced that the Russians would arrive that night. They’d filled the place with gasoline in tanks and hose pipes, intending to immolate themselves and anybody who came after them, and raided every construction site in the city with cranes and bulldozers and brought all the concrete blocks they could find and built a sort of medieval fortification around it. It was pretty frightening, but it was the only place with a telephone where I could call my wife in Moscow who would then transmit it to London.”
Peter Hitchens has many such stories; last year, he marked fifty years as a journalist. Currently a columnist with the Mail on Sunday, his career has taken him to 57 countries, including stints as a foreign correspondent in Moscow and Washington, D.C., and given him a ringside seat to some of the great historical events of the last century. He is now Britain’s best-known conservative polemicist with nine books to his name, including The Abolition of Britain, The Rage Against God, and The Phoney Victory. In 2010 he was awarded The Orwell Prize for his journalism, the UK’s most prestigious accolade for political writing. It was an honour he cherished; he “fell in love with George Orwell” in his middle teens after reading Orwell’s collected essays, and his desire to emulate that form of writing, he told me, has “always been the main thing that drove me.”
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