Moscow Calling: Memoirs of a Foreign Correspondent

By Angus Roxburgh

A personal and revealing perspective of Russia by the acclaimed former BBC and Sunday Times Moscow correspondent, who worked in Russia for over 30 years and who witnessed first-hand the darkest days of communism and the rise of Putin

In the course of the past forty-five years, Angus Roxburgh has translated Tolstoy, met three successive Russian presidents and been jinxed by a Siberian shaman. He has come under fire in war zones and been arrested by Chechen thugs. He was wooed by the KGB, who then decided he would make a lousy spy and expelled him from the country.

In Moscow Calling Roxburgh presents his Russia - not the Russia of news reports, but a quirky, crazy, exasperating, beautiful, tumultuous world that in forty years has changed completely, and yet not at all. From the dark, fearful days of communism and his adventures as a correspondent as the Soviet Union collapsed into chaos, to his frustrating work as a media consultant in Putin's Kremlin, this is a unique, fascinating and often hilarious insight into a country that today, more than ever, is of global political significance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Birlinn
• Release date: Sep 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9780857909824

Angus Roxburgh

Angus Roxburgh studied Russian and German at Aberdeen University. A distinguished journalist and broadcaster, he was Sunday Times Moscow correspondent (1987-89), BBC Moscow correspondent (1991-97) and BBC Europe correspondent (1998-2005). From 2006-2009 he was media consultant to the Kremlin, and is now a freelance writer and journalist. He is the author of the acclaimed The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia and was consultant on the award-winning BBC documentaries, The Second Russian Revolution, and Putin, Russia and the West.

Reviews for Moscow Calling

[steve38 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Very good but could have been better. Memoirs of a journalist specialising in Russia. But someone who was fascinated by Russia who became a journalist to enable him to live there and learn more. Not a journalist who became a Russian expert. Only at the beginning and end does his lifelong fascination with Russian culture shine through. The middle sections are cut and paste chapters from his library of his own reports. Pity. Maybe one day he'll just write a book about Russia and explain it all to us.