Moscow Calling – Memoirs of a Foreign Correspondent

Angus Roxburgh

Birlinn, £16.99

Review by David Pratt

I HAVE a story about Angus Roxburgh, the author of this book. One night while dining together at a restaurant in Glasgow, our conversation was interrupted by a call on his mobile phone. Judging by Roxburgh’s response, the caller was evidently Russian. Excusing himself from the table, Roxburgh began replying fluently in the language that initially captured his imagination as a teenager and took him off to Moscow in the first place. A short time after the call he returned to the table.

“It was someone from the Kremlin, running a press release by me,” he said nonchalantly by way of explanation, before picking up the conversation where we had left off.

Over the years that I’ve known Angus Roxburgh, Russia has never been far from his mind. Over a meal or glass of wine, the presence of this vast land, still mysterious to so many of us, has always punctuated our encounters. I’ve no doubt it’s the same with whomever he meets or wherever he might be. Russia is in Angus Roxburgh’s DNA.

His years of trying to get inside what he describes in this book, as the "crazy, drunken, impetuous, remorseful, loving, wide-open, tight-shut heart" of Russia, is intimately evident in the pages of this memoir. Picking up a book written by a friend to read and review can be a tricky, even traumatic, experience. But before anyone accuses me of being partisan in my assessment of Moscow Calling, can I simply say that I’ve read his work before and listened to his songs – he does write those too – and always felt that this book was something he longed to get out of his creative system.

As he himself admits in the opening pages "this is the book I have been slowly writing in my head for the past forty-odd years."

Friends as we are, Roxburgh is too professional a writer and consummate a journalist to expect a friend to automatically review his work favourably. As it is, neither he nor I need have worried. Excellent television reporter as he was I’ve always felt that Roxburgh was first and foremost a wordsmith. Perhaps it was all those long hours at Progress Publishers that he recounts in the first part of this book, when he was translating Tolstoy or Gogol that helped hone his skills as a writer. Or maybe it’s just that this is someone who quite simply writes beautifully, with a lyricism and descriptive touch beyond ordinary reportage and that any serious novelist would be proud of.

To give but one example. In an early passage Roxburgh describes how he and his wife Neilian, who had accompanied him to Moscow, find themselves one night trying to get home from a dinner party.

With state-run taxis few and far between their host arranges for them to hitch a ride on a snowplough for 15 roubles.

"We could have been riding in a horse-drawn carriage, for all I knew – whirling along on the famous troika that Gogol likened to Russia herself," writes Roxburgh, before quoting the great Russian author.

"The flying road turns into smoke beneath you, bridges thunder and pass, everything falls back and is left behind! Russia, where are you speeding to?"

Little did Roxburgh know it when he first arrived in Moscow but Russia was indeed speeding in a remarkable direction. As first a book translator, then Sunday Times correspondent before eventually becoming the BBC’s man in Moscow he was there for Glasnost and Perestroika, the Chechen War and other upheavals, witnessing it all first hand. While the sub-title of this book Memoirs of a Foreign Correspondent, would suggest this to be just another of those reporter reflects type accounts, it’s not really of that genre.

Yes, the latter part of the book does tell of those many huge news events Roxburgh covered both as newspaperman and broadcaster, but never is this allowed to get in the way of his own relationship with Russia. Be it the stultifying bureaucracy, shortages of commodities, the piercing Russian winter, where "car keys snapped off in the lock" or those autumn days where "golden leaves dangled in the birch trees like little coins," this is always about one man’s love – and at times – hate relationship with a country and its people.

At its best and most poignant it’s the personal cameos that makes this book work so well. There is, too, tremendous humour and sometimes just the utterly intriguing anecdote, as when Roxburgh is cursed by a Siberian shaman.

Then there is the family friend Boris who turns out to be a KGB man who babysits Roxburgh’s son. This on the day Roxburgh and his wife go to the British Embassy to seek advice after being told of his deportation along with other British journalists, as part of a tit-for-tat expulsion of westerners during a spy spat between London and Moscow at the height of the Thatcher years.

Not content in giving the reader all this intrigue there is towards the end a brief account of the period in 2006 when Roxburgh was a consultant for a company working for the Kremlin’s PR machine.

PR was not to his taste, bringing him to the conclusion that, "I saw little to change my perception that PR was all charlatanism".

Even without reading about his time in this role, I might have drawn that conclusion for myself following that phone call in the Glasgow restaurant that night some years ago. He never did look too happy that evening about that press release, whatever it contained.

The Angus Roxburgh I know is way too much of a real artist to be a PR man. Those looking for the memoirs of a foreign correspondent will find them in this book. But what they will find too is an elegy to Russia, by someone deeply etched by its influence and its continuing presence in his life. I say this not just because I know Angus Roxburgh, but because it so obviously rings true in the pages of this book.