Assignment Moscow: reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin

In 1931, Britain’s ambassador to Moscow, Esmond Ovey, told Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson how difficult it was to find a balance between the various accounts about the conditions in the USSR. Views from pro-Soviets could be overly optimistic as they saw nothing but good, while anti-Soviets were deeply pessimistic and believed only negative accounts. Striking a balance between these interpretations was a problem for much of the USSR’s history, and even now this can still be tricky. How Russia’s story has been told, and by whom, is the focus of the highly informative and timely Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin by James Rodgers, a former foreign correspondent in Russia for the BBC and Reuters who now lectures in Journalism.