![]() ![]() I eventually wrote Moscow Nights while we were in London, our next overseas post it was published in 2000 in Britain. A New York agent scribbled a note at the bottom of her form rejection letter: Make it up. The place had gotten under my skin and I wondered if anyone would believe the fever dream that had been our life there: the appalling poverty and repression, the creepiness of constantly being spied on, how we grew to accept things that would seem utterly bizarre in the West as normal life in Moscow. ![]() Back home in the US as he was recuperating at Walter Reed Army Hospital and we were trying to put our life back together, I knew I wanted to write about our time in Russia. (Some people still believe the Sovs had a role in what happened to him, but we’ll never know, and we let it go years ago). Our time in Moscow came to a screeching halt in December 1990 when André contracted a rare but reversible-and potentially fatal-paralysis called Guillain-Barré Syndrome after returning home from a trip to Kyiv. The story and photo landed on the front page. Not only that, our arrival hadn’t gone unnoticed: a reporter from one of the Moscow newspapers interviewed André and a photographer took a photo of us with our three young children in front of our hotel a few days after we arrived. Being a journalist was already considered a dead easy cover for a spy. Daniloff claimed the papers found on him had been planted, but the incident escalated into an international crisis at the highest level involving multiple tit-for-tat expulsions by the US and USSR that went on for years.Ĭould André be accused of spying if he, say, reported on a story that the Soviets didn’t like and they wanted to retaliate? You bet. News & World Report who spoke fluent Russian like my husband did and had family ties to pre-revolutionary Russia, also like my husband, had been arrested by the KGB, accused of espionage, and held in Lefortovo Prison for fifteen days. André’s grandfather, a naval officer, had been a captain of the yacht belonging to Tsar Nicholas II who, along with his family, would later be brutally executed.īut my real gnawing worry was this: three years earlier, Nicholas Daniloff, an American journalist with U.S. In fact, they terrified me because my husband spoke perfect Russian thanks to a Ukrainian grandmother and a Russian grandfather who barely managed to flee to France as the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917. It was André’s dream assignment, VOA had always wanted him in Moscow, and those things worried me. Still, I had never wanted to move to Russia. The hours were crazy, the work was non-stop, but it was fascinating, and I loved it. It didn’t matter that my only experience in radio journalism was being married to a radio journalist: the bureau chief in Moscow persuaded the bosses in New York to hire me anyway and suddenly I was the resident stringer-freelancer-for ABC Radio News, the largest radio network in the US. And so at midnight I got out of bed and padded into the kitchen for a telephone job interview, of sorts. ![]()
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