From Russian Optimist to Prisoner of the State
BOOK REVIEW: ODYSSEY MOSCOW: One American’s Journey from Russia Optimist to Prisoner of the State
By Michael Calvey / The History Press
Reviewed by: Jean-Thomas Nicole
The Reviewer: Jean-Thomas Nicole is a Policy Advisor with Public Safety Canada. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policies or positions of Public Safety Canada or the Canadian government.
Review – Michael Calvey is an American-born global investor and financial entrepreneur who made a fortune in Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. His life turned to nightmare when, in 2019, he was accused of fraud and placed in a notorious Russian prison waiting trial. “Odyssey Moscow: One American’s Journey from Russia Optimist to Prisoner of the State” is his book telling that tale.
Calvey, a self-described “innovation enthusiast with three decades of experience across a range of industries, notably in fintech” and a knack for marketing and self-promotion, was a founder and co-senior partner of Baring Vostok, a private equity firm recognized for its early investments in several innovative, emerging, and highly successful companies, including Yandex, Tinkoff, and Kaspi in post-communist Russia and Kazakhstan. Living in Moscow for almost three decades from 1994 to 2022, he learned the language, married a Russian woman and forged a broad network of personal and business contacts.
On February 14, 2019, Michael Calvey’s life was turned upside down when he was arrested by the FSB on false charges amidst a corporate dispute with local business rivals over Vostochny, a Russian bank.
The book takes readers from his shocking imprisonment in Moscow’s notorious Matrosskaya Tishina jail, colloquially called ‘Kremlin Central’ because so many inmates are involved in high-profile cases being investigated with the highest level of scrutiny, through his long fight for justice against a backdrop of misrepresentations and abusive legal tactics by his accusers.
In such cases, an informal approval for arrest and detention is typically sought from the Kremlin itself. The upside is that most prisoners in there are being investigated for economic crimes, rather than violent ones, and that living conditions are better than the average prison. The bad news is that virtually no one gets released without a conviction.
Calvey’s arrest provoked widespread condemnation not just by the US Government and the international press, but across Russian society. It was a rare example of Russia’s business elites and economic officials uniting with average people and the local media to push back against the security services.
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Odyssey Moscow also flashes back to Calvey’s early days in Russia in the wild and chaotic 1990s, including personal anecdotes demonstrating why many young foreigners like him fell in love with Russia and its culture. It is especially for those lively historical and cultural explorations across three different decades rather than the slower, more introspective, almost too sentimental prison chapters that the book is worth reading, all things well considered.
Conversely, Calvey spends way too much time arguing his criminal case, with almost all the details of his related financial operations, in front of the reader. A good editor would have removed half of it before printing; it does not help the story move forward. For me, real heroes face adversity head-on, with fortitude, determination and purpose every day, instead of whining about it for pages and pages… even when put in a prison of an authoritarian and Kafkaesque state on dubious charges. Think about the Soviet dissidents with their political and literary legacy.
Ultimately, the book presents a stark contrast between the optimism many felt about Russia twenty or thirty years ago with the tragic reality of Russia today. Calvey concludes the book with a frank assessment of what he and other former Russia optimists got wrong.
For instance, he says Putin’s security and control apparatus, the siloviki – is a much bigger problem now for Russia and its neighbors and will be much harder to eliminate. The Russian people themselves are the principal victims of this cynical and remorseless system.
Today, Calvey is chairman of Baring Ventures, a firm which advises private equity funds with assets of approximately $5 billion market value. Further, according to a recent portrait published in the Financial Times, Calvey is now focusing on his main non-Russian asset, Kaspi, as well as start-ups run by exiled Russians such as Plata, an online bank in Mexico set up by former Tinkoff staff.
He is now said to be open to potential investments in Ukraine should the fighting die down. But he thinks western countries should be doing more to encourage exiled Russian entrepreneurial talent. Concluding the same article, he finally hopes the companies he helped build could help Russia change for the better. He is still therefore optimistic about Russians — just very pessimistic about Russia itself.
In my view, in the book Calvey overestimated human rationality and underestimated the role of geopolitics and nationalism. No matter how the war in Ukraine ends, Russia will be worse off strategically than it was beforehand; the combination of eroding freedoms and nationalist fervor eventually resulted in something terrible.
Finally, as someone not engaged in politics, Calvey didn’t think brutal and arbitrary types of arrests could ever apply to him, and probably also assumed that being a foreigner provided at least some additional protection. All those assumptions proved to be deadly wrong.
Odyssey Moscow: One American’s Journey from Russia Optimist to Prisoner of the State earns a respectable 2.5 out of 4 trench coats
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