Odyssey Moscow: One American's Journey from Russia Optimist to Prisoner of the State

by Michael Calvey

Overview

‘A riveting tale of betrayal and lawlessness by the Russian Government, told by the most successful US investor in Russia’ – Ambassador John Sullivan, US Ambassador to Russia 2020–22

It is dawn on Thursday, 14 February 2019, and armed FSB agents are raiding Michael Calvey’s Moscow apartment.

He is being arrested for a crime that never happened.

Twenty-eight years earlier, Calvey – a newly graduated, aspiring Wall Street hotshot – made a short trip from America to the recently collapsed USSR to look at potential investments. Sensing huge opportunity, he soon based himself in Moscow, where he lived through the ‘Wild East’ years and went on to build several billion-dollar funds – earning enormous returns for Western investors as Russia opened up to international business. He gained a reputation that would lead to Bloomberg describing him as ‘a legend in the Russian market, with a reputed aversion to any kind of foul play’.

But now, he finds himself thrown into Moscow’s notorious Matrosskaya Tishina prison on charges trumped up by local business rivals. As the White House and Kremlin argue about his incarceration, Calvey is caught in a Kafka-esque trap, denied access to evidence proving his innocence.

Odyssey Moscow is the story not just of Michael Calvey, but of how Russia’s era of hope and aspiration finally died, and how light can be found in the darkest of places.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781803997308
Publisher:	The History Press
Publication date:	05/27/2025
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	9.25(w) x 6.25(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Michael Calvey was a Founder and Co-Senior Partner of Baring Vostok, a private equity firm recognized for its early investments in numerous highly successful companies. Living in Moscow for almost three decades, he learned the language, married a Russian woman and forged an unmatched network of contacts. Today, he is Chairman of Baring Ventures, which sold all its Russian assets after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and now focuses on other international markets. He is a US citizen living in Switzerland and the UK.

Editorial Reviews

USA TodayBestseller

“A brilliant new memoir.”—Spectator

‘A riveting tale of betrayal and lawlessness by the Russian Government, told by the most successful US investor in Russia. Calvey narrates an incredible story of creating a thriving business in Russia and with Russians over decades that is laid waste by the Kremlin. His harrowing experience in recent years – an innocent man caught and punished in the Russian criminal justice system – is told with clinical and chilling detail.’ — Ambassador John Sullivan, US Ambassador to Russia 2020–22
 

From the Publisher

2025-05-05
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.

Kirkus Reviews