ODYSSEY MOSCOW

An American businessman recounts his experiences as a Russian prisoner in this debut memoir.

In February 2019, Calvey was awakened in his Moscow apartment by officers with the Federal Security Service (the successor organization to the Soviet Union’s secret police, the KGB) who had burst through his front door. “In the course of a few surreal, terrifying hours,” he writes in the book’s preface, he had “morphed from one of the most successful Western businessmen in Russia into a prisoner of the state.” The co-founder of Baring Vostok, a private equity firm with billions in assets, Calvey was charged with embezzlement stemming from a corporate dispute with two minority shareholders whose claims, he states, were “bogus and without substance.” As a wealthy American businessman, his arrest and subsequent trial made international headlines. In this book, he offers a first-hand account of corruption, abuse, and political intrigue in 21st-century Russia. He compares the Russian Investigative Committee to George Orwell’s dystopian “Ministry of Truth” and details inmate hierarchies inside cell 604, where his fellow prisoners included a former Deputy Minister of Culture. Calvey acknowledges the advantages his American citizenship and personal wealth granted him in contrast to his Russian-born comrades in prison: Not only could he afford one of Russia’s best criminal lawyers, he had the support of the U.S. Department of State during both the Trump and Biden administrations. (“My wrongful detention was raised by them and others in almost every bilateral meeting held between the US and Russian government officials from 2019 and 2022,” he writes.) While he was initially found guilty and sentenced to house arrest, he was allowed to leave the country, and he was reunited with his loved ones in Oklahoma. His company would fully disinvest from Russia following the invasion of the Ukraine, and his conviction was ultimately vacated in 2024. The author’s intimate, gripping writing style, as well as his expertise on contemporary Russian politics and business, paint an accessible, troubling portrait of a nation increasingly reliant on authoritarian, state-sanctioned violence and intimidation.

A haunting look at contemporary Russia from the perspective of an American prisoner.