Siberia! The very word sobs with coldness, silence, isolation and despair. But when Mikhail Gorbachev was toppled, his successors did not pack him off to that barren territory, east of the Urals, larger than the United States. They eased him into semi-retirement in something called the Gorbachev Institute.
A new kind of Siberia, imported from the West.
Siberia the place, of course, is still there, but its use as a prison without walls for millions who opposed various Soviet regimes ended last January when Boris Yeltsin freed the last of that country`s political prisoners.
What`s emerging in Russia now, it appears, is a concept that could be called ”Siberia, the Idea.” It`s a practice, known to most major Western institutions, ranging from local government to big private companies, of dumping the unwanted into foundations, think tanks, consultancies or departments with vague titles, like ”community relations.”
In the FBI, for example, Siberia has meant Omaha. On The Wall Street Journal, Cleveland. In the State Department, American Samoa. For United Press International, staff members who fouled up were threatened with a posting to Fargo, N.D. With the Chicago Transit Authority, it`s not unknown for people who screw up to wind up working the phone banks in customer relations, forever handling rider complaints and requests for information.
These are not necessarily bad jobs. Or bad places. ”Even in Siberia, they grow things,” notes Jay Lorsch, a Harvard University business professor. Still, Siberia, the idea, always involves letting people know that they are no longer on the cutting edge, in the mainstream, or on the way up.
In Washington, one popular tactic is to cut a person`s name from the routing list for important documents. In academia, professors in disfavor often find themselves assigned to teach ”Western Civ” on Saturday mornings, or losing parking privileges. In Loop law firms, failing partners are stripped of associates, the younger lawyers who do much of the work. At Chicago Board of Education headquarters on Pershing Road, one bureaucrat recently moaned,
”I`m going to Siberia,” after he`d been reassigned-to a school.
Nor are such exiles, or loss of status, solely secular matters.
”With us, it used to be Coal City, but that`s in the Joliet diocese now, so we lost it,” recalls Rev. Andrew Greeley, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy who has never personally been sent to a Siberia.
Any church posting, undertaken with proper devotion, can be rewarding, Greeley added, but troublesome priests are tested in special ways, dispatched to Trappist monasteries, as chaplains to retirement homes, or to the Vatican, which, Greeley said, ”is loaded with honorific titles with no power.”
Many big-city priests, after unsettling conflicts, have found themselves in parishes in the South or West. ”Tucson,” Greeley went on, ”has a nice climate and also seems to be a Siberia for the Mafia. `Go there, don`t cause trouble and we won`t kill you,` they`re told. You see a lot of them in restaurants there, their backs to the wall, always looking around.”
In the media, Siberias abound.
At CBS News, the elections unit is known as a Siberia for producers, especially now that networks are scaling down political coverage. When CBS news producer Susan Zirinsky, the model for the driven producer portrayed by Holly Hunter in the movie ”Broadcast News,” was recently sent there, she was so appalled that she asked CBS to hold up the announcement until her agent could attempt spin control.
One of columnist Mike Royko`s first jobs, in the 1950s, was editing a newspaper at O`Hare Air Force Base. When he revealed that a softball pitcher had his tour of duty extended so he could play in a championship game, the base commander shut down the paper and assigned Royko as a non-commissioned officer in charge of the bachelor and transient officers` quarters, a sort of hotel clerk, for his final months in the service.
Even fine-arts radio stations have their ways. Two years ago, during an imbroglio at WFMT-FM 98.7, author-broadcaster Studs Terkel found that his office, along with a mountain of tapes, had moved to a corner of the WFMT announcers lounge.
Chicago`s Siberia
Chicago, of course, has its own Siberia. It can be anywhere outside of Chicago.
In 1976, when Jane Pauley was shifted to New York to become co-host of NBC`s ”Today,” after a hard year as a news anchor at WMAQ-Ch. 5, it was widely assumed here that she had been demoted.
In 1984, when Jesse Jackson first ran for the Democratic nomination for president, local analysts sniffingly noted that Jackson made his decision only after his bid to become mayor of Chicago had derailed.
Similarly, when they moved outside Chicago, publisher Hugh Hefner and talk-show host Phil Donahue had to face local speculation that their careers were in decline. Donahue split to New York, it was assumed, because of the ascendancy of Oprah Winfrey. Hefner was unable to handle the climate. As Chicago historian Emmett Dedmon observed, ”Even the (Playboy) Mansion could not shut out Chicago`s weather and Hefner exiled himself to California, where hedonism could be practiced in the sunshine.”
Many Siberias have to do with finding out what a person really likes to do-then forcing him to do something else. Mary Wertsch, author of ”Military Brats” (Fawcett Columbine), a book probing the dark side of life in military families, recalls that her father was desperately unhappy in Paris.
”He was an infantry officer, meant to lead men through mud, under fire, up hills,” she said in an interview from her home in Massachusetts. One fateful day, during an argument, ”he threw his fountain pen at his commanding officer,” an action for which he could have been court-martialed. Instead, he was posted to Paris, as a comptroller. ”He had no idea how to do it,” she said. ”He hated it. He took one more posting after that, and retired.”
In the military, Siberia isn`t always a matter of where you go. It`s what you do, and are you getting promotions? Wertsch remembered how, when she was a youngster at Camp Pendleton in Southern California, the base had a family service center. ”There is always a military officer in command of such facilities,” she said. ”In this case, the man had been a tank commander. Tell me, for him, running a family service center wasn`t a Siberia?”
A matter of principle
Often, Siberias spring from principle. One source for ”Military Brats”
spoke proudly of the day her father`s career was ruined. A major general at the Pentagon, he was on track to become commandant of the Air Force Academy when he was called to testify at a congressional hearing about military spending. ”He stood up to (an extremely powerful senator). He was honest with the senator and for that he was punished,” the daughter told Wertsch. His commanding officer yelled, ”You`re finished.” He was never again promoted.
In corporate life, notes Jeffery A. Sonnenfeld, director of Emory University`s Center for Leadership and Career Studies in Atlanta, ”This kind of (Siberia) thing tended to happen at organizations which didn`t provide much adventure or top wages, but did offer security. You`d find it in utilities, commercial banks, the old phone company. They all had an infinite array of positions in departments like community relations.
”An ad agency, bio research firm or entertainment company would never dream of this,” he added.
While secure, corporate Siberias aren`t necessarily good, says James Drury, head of the Chicago office of Spencer Stuart, an executive recruiting firm. The people he deals with, he said, would not allow themselves to be shunted off. Rather than stick with a corporation, ”they`d take a buyout, spend a year on the beach and go to work somewhere else.”
Nor, on the other hand, are all Siberias bad. ”In Japan,” said Lorsch, of Harvard`s business school, ”when an executive reaches a certain age, they move him down into running a subsidiary. It`s expected, so that people behind you can come up. It`s better like that than to get laid off at 55 or 60.”
(It should be noted that Harvard itself is home to one of the cushier Siberias, the John F. Kennedy School of Government. It`s a frequent resting place for out-of-work, usually liberal, domestic and foreign government and media types.)
At some U.S. companies, Lorsch added, Siberia is more like a penalty box. At IBM, it used to involve being moved away from technology fronts, into something like office products. At General Electric, people who failed were demoted. In both places, miscreants could earn their way back through good performance.
On the decline
Is that still true? Although corporate communication departments have little to say on internal policies, Lorsch doubts it. ”Many companies have broken the social contract they had with middle management,” he said. ”Now, if you don`t like what a guy is doing, you fire him.”
”I think Siberias are declining,” agreed Paul Hirsch, a professor at Northwestern University`s Kellogg School of Management. ”Companies are doing what they`re told to do. Be lean and mean. Cut away fat. The new form of Siberia is to help you get out, without announcing that`s what`s happening.” As companies cut back, he says, long-term Siberias are being eliminated. Instead of retaining out-of-favor employees, companies drop them, not by firings, but by turning them over to outplacement services, a slower process. Another wrinkle, ”sending to Coventry,” was derived from an English labor practice of refusing to speak or otherwise communicate with those who failed to follow union orders. When corporations do it, the goal is to emotionally starve employees into quitting, thus cutting severance packages.
That happened in the 1970s at Citicorp, a New York banking empire. Downsizing, Citicorp moved to cut 9,000 of 95,000 employees. ”They would take whole groups of people, give them each a room, a desk and nothing to do-and wait for them to quit,” recalls one who watched it happen. Most left.
Older employees of Life magazine recall a tale of one of their colleagues who faced the same problem. Sent to Coventry, he took inventory of his situation and found that he was in the middle of Manhattan with an office, a phone and a typewriter. Since no one would talk to him, he wrote a book.
A year later, so the story goes, the book was published. A Life senior editor read it and suggested that the magazine buy a chapter. ”Why, he`s already on our staff,” said an underling. Immediately, the estranged staff member was back in favor. Two editors opened his door and invited him to lunch.
”I`ve heard that story,” noted Art Shay, a longtime employee of Life and now a free-lance writer-photographer. ”It`s somewhat like what happened to me.”
In 1948, a senior Life staff member wanted to fire Shay for sneaking in to take a picture of Earl Warren, then governor of California, as Warren voted, presumably for himself, since he was running for vice president. Cooler heads prevailed. Life`s management decided not to sack Shay, but to send him to Siberia.
”And that,” Shay says, ”is how I got to Chicago-and I`ve been here ever since.”
