Interview with Dmitry Glukhovsky

Dmitry Glukhovsky, RT’s correspondent, who took part in the Russian Polar expedition, shared his professional and personal view on covering the daring scientific journey.

Russia Today: Hello Dmitry. First of all – what are your impressions? What was the most exciting thing?

D.G.: It was my first time at the North Pole – quite impressive in itself. Certainly, the most nervous moment was waiting for the Mir subs to come up. Actually, every expedition leader and every crew member – Mr Sagalevich, Mr Chilingarov, Mr Gruzdev, all of them – understood that it was a very risky task to come up and find this small window in the thick ice. But we weren’t sure that they would be able to do that.

The subs were coming up in all the wrong places, then they came in next to the ship – but on the wrong side, and it hit the ship several times. We were very scared for the sub and for the ship. Then finally they came up safely in the right place, and a special assistance crew for the divers’ team went to the sub and helped the crew to get out of it. So when we saw that everybody was safe and sound – that was certainly a very emotional moment.

RT: We at the studio were expecting you to wearing a heavy fur coat or something. But you looked actually quite underdressed for the place. Was it not cold?

D.G.: No, it wasn’t. As a matter of fact it’s summer, the warmest time of the year. And that’s why the expedition organisers decided to choose this time for the journey. The ice is the thinnest possible this time of year. It was about zero degrees Celsius – not very cold.

RT: Well, in Moscow it’s quite different.

D.G.: Yeah. By comparison it’s very different.

RT: What was the hardest part for you?

D.G.: We were one of the first channels to organise live reports from the Pole, and it was difficult – there was no infrastructure, and we had to use a certain not too accessible sound recording system and do it all for the first time. That was quite a challenging part of the work. Also we were trying to cover everything possible, and it wasn’t easy in those conditions with everyone nervous about whether this dive was going to succeed or not.

RT: And what about you personally, not as a professional, but as a human being at the North Pole?

D.G.: As I said, it wasn’t very cold. Well, it was interesting, something I’ve never done before. There wasn’t anything particularly very hard. But there were a lot of very emotional things.