Moscow Calling: Memoirs of a Foreign Correspondent [Paperback]

In the course of the past 45 years, Angus Roxburgh has translated Tolstoy, met four successive Russian presidents and been jinxed by a Siberian shaman. He has come under fire in war zones and been arrested by Chechen thugs. During the Cold War 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 four decades has changed completely, and yet in some ways not at all. From the dark, fearful days of communism and his adventures as a correspondent covering the Soviet Unions collapse into chaos, to his frustrating work as a media consultant to Putins Kremlin, his memoir offers a unique, fascinating and at times hilarious insight into a country that today, more than ever, is of global political significance.A self-critical author writing his memoirs sounds like a contradiction in terms. Angus Roxburgh, though, has produced a book that illuminates discerningly the dramatic changes that have occurred in Russia over the past 40 years, many of which he witnessed at first hand. His account is often amusing, sometimes grim (when he recalls his experience reporting wars in Chechnya and Afghanistan), but consistently perceptive'If you are looking for the Russia beyond the political clich? then this is the book for you. An intimate and incisive account of a famous journalists long-term relationship with the country, a relationship as complex and intense as any Russian novel'If you want a good, enthralling memoir of the great, raging days of turmoil in Russia and the USSR, as witnessed and recorded by an honest man, this is the one to read'Moscow Calling is at least two books in one  a? memoir if those first years in Moscow, and a wider-focused story about covering one of the twentieth centurys biggest stories: the sudden decline and fall of the Soviet Union. The threading togetheló¦