Back in the USSR: New book of dispatches by celebrated correspondent Rupert Cornwell

When The Independent sent Cornwell to Moscow in 1987 he received bird's eye to serious history

[Rupert Cornwell reporting from Moscow’s Central Hippodrome racecourse in 1987. Image: Conor O’Clery]

The journalist Rupert Cornwell was always remarkably modest about his work in the Soviet Union. 

It is not that he did not take it seriously. Indeed, he dedicated himself to the four years he spent there between 1987 and 1991, aware that what he and others witnessed and wrote about was utterly historic - the reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, and the steps he put in place that would lead to the dissolution of the Soviet empire. 

Rupert never seriously considered, however, writing a book about what he had seen. In part that was because when he left Moscow, he headed straight to Washington DC to head The Independent’s bureau and was thrust into another major story that would take his time. 

There was also the issue, he would say, that Russia’s story was very much a moving thing. There was the danger with a book, as there is with any attempt to nail down an historic narrative, that what he detailed would be rapidly overtaken by events and made out of date. 

But with time, comes perspective. Three decades after Rupert left Moscow, his widow, Susan Cornwell, has published an e-book titled Out of the USSR, containing 100 of Rupert’s dispatches. 

They start in Jan 1987 with a piece headlined “Gorbachev’s new broom threatens the Brezhnev men’, and end in early Jan 1991 with a farewell report titled “Exit from the land of fading hopes”. 

“I leave the Soviet Union with sadness. Not with the same sadness of old, when the last flight back to the West was a journey of no return, a break for ever with cherished people and places,” that latter piece starts. 

“These days Soviet visas are issued at the drop of a hat, and even correspondents expelled as imperialist spies are allowed back within a year. My sadness is different: of hope dissolving, as four years of perestroika crumble under the sheer weight of history.” 

[Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev meet at the Iceland Reykjavik Summit in Oct 1986. Image: Courtesy White House/Wikicommons]

Among the pieces are top-shelf analysis about policy and events, but they also include more personal dispatches, such as a trip to the races or the dry cleaners, that in their own way tell the reader as much about the country as the more “serious” journalism. Rupert had a great eye for detail and was an elegant writer. 

While parts of the Berlin Wall started coming down in Nov 1989 as momentum grew among independence movements in eastern Europe, the Soviet Union was not officially dissolved, with the hammer and sickle lowered over the Kremlin, until Dec 25 1991. 

If Rupert was modest about his talents, Susan is even more so about her own. As a reporter for Reuters in Moscow, she was not only Rupert’s partner and participator-in-adventures, but a highly talented journalist. They witnessed history together. 

And while Rupert might have questioned the idea of a book of his work, she had no hesitation. “He would have rolled his eyes at the whole thing. He was extremely modest,” she says, back from a trip to New York where a group of friends and former colleagues, including Ann Cooper, formerly of National Public Radio, held a launch party. 

Susan’s efforts are part tribute to her late husband, who died in 2017 at the age of 71. Yet she insists they stand alone as of body of work of great utility for anyone interested in the Soviet Union at that time, or in Russia since. 

If anything, Susan says, the book’s contents have become more relevant and insightful, not less. When she and Rupert first went to Moscow, Vladimir Putin was a KGB agent stationed in East Germany, later returning home to denounce the fall of the Soviet Union as the century’s most calamitous day. 

The issues Rupert identified in those handful of heady years, and the challenges for reformers such as Gorbachev, proved to be strikingly prescient. 

She says she plans to contact universities with Russian history departments to alert them to the new resource, now available. 

“I think it would be a good text for people who are studying Russian history or the history of the Soviet period,” she says. “If I were a student reading Russian history, especially the Soviet period, and especially the Gorbachev period, I would want to look at this.” 

[Susan and Rupert Cornwell in London in 1988. Image: Courtesy Susan Cornwell]

Indeed, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and his returning of Russia into an authoritative, centrally controlled state, underscored the challenges for those who had pushed for openness and the famed perestroika. 

Rupert wrote about Putin several times after leaving Russia, when his later career would include two stints as The Independent’s Washington bureau chief. 

In 2009, he wrote about the challenges for the incoming administration of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, set against the context of their wish for a relationship “reset” with Russia. 

“Relations between Washington and its one-time superpower rival are not simple at the best of times. They are made more complicated now by the divided leadership structure,” he wrote. 

“Formally, Mr Obama's counterpart is President Dimitri Medvedev. But no one doubts that real power still lies with former president Vladimir Putin, now Prime Minister.” 

Rupert, who in 1987 published God's Banker: An Account of the Life and Death of Roberto Calvi, was a mentor to many in journalism. I had the privilege of getting to know him and Susan, when I shared an office in Washington DC from 2001-2007. He was kind and generous, and also a good laugh. 

One of the main reasons I have had the chance to travel so widely in the United States, was Rupert’s encouragement. 

A feature idea in Montana? “Oh you must go, it’s stunning.” A vice presidential debate in Cleveland between Dick Cheney and John Edwards? “Andy, why don’t you take that one?” 

What was also very evident was that Rupert never lost his love for Russia, or the time he spent there. 

Bear in mind, these were the days after 9/11, the Iraq war and its alleged WMD, and George W Bush’s “war on terror”. This was serious stuff, as he would reflect. . 

Yet, he was always ready to share his tales from Russia and the end of the Soviet Union, events I think he believed had no parallel since the Second World War. 

Alongside the story playing out before his eyes, he also enjoyed the vastness and scale of Russia, with its 11 time zones. He loved the physical elements: the freezing chill of its winters, and the pleasure of a thick coat. 

A small part of him, I think, regretted never being able to track down and interview the British spy, Kim Philby, part of “the Cambridge Five”, who was forced to flee to Moscow after being outed in 1963. 

He died in Moscow a little over a year after Rupert arrived, and a few months before Philby’s death, the Australian author Philip Knightly interviewed him for The Sunday Times. 

As it was, Rupert wrote a warm review of Knightly’s book about Philby, Philby: The Life and Views of the KGB Masterspy, for the London Review of Books.  He recalled attending Philby’s state funeral in May 1988 at Kuntsevo Cemetery on the western outskirts of Moscow, where Philby was buried to “the strains of the Soviet national anthem, with full military honours”. 

He said when he arrived in Moscow, two members of the five - Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean - were long dead. (Anthony Blunt would die in 2020 and the man widely believed to be the fifth, John Cairncross, would not be outed until 1990. Cairncross died in 1995.) 

“Philby, however, was still alive when I started work in Moscow as the Independent’s correspondent there in early 1987, and his presence was a source of recurrent nightmares,” Rupert wrote. 

“Naturally I had put out feelers for an interview, but they led nowhere. In the back of my mind was the thought that a competitor might be more fortunate, and land what for a British reporter was the biggest scoop in the Soviet Union.” 

[Rupert Cornwell foresaw the challenges Vladimir Putin would present to the West. Image: Courtesy Wikicommons]

He said he had been alerted to The Sunday Times serialisation of the new book by Knightly - who had been seeking an interview for 20 years - by the BBC World Service on a Sunday morning. 

“My reaction was one of relief: one had lost, but that was a pretty acceptable way of doing so,” he said. 

It had long been rumoured there were more than just four spies. Another story Rupert enjoyed recounting, was the first ever international press conference for the KGB in 1989 when he asked an official who had overseen Philby, whether there was a “fifth man”. “Yes, there was,” said official Yuri Modin. Modin was asked who it was. “British counterintelligence has been trying to work that one out without success for 30 years,” he replied. 

The Independent splashed the news the following day, and Rupert’s report is among those contained in the new e-book. 

For Susan, curating the book has been bittersweet, throwing up many emotions and forcing her to think back to the time she and Rupert spent together in Russia, technically journalistic competitors, but very much a team. 

Another thing to overcome was getting her hands on her late husband’s reports. That solution came in the form of Rupert’s mother, who like many proud parents, every day clipped her son’s reports from her copy of The Independent. She presented the collection to Rupert and Susan more than a decade ago, aware of their value not just to her but to others. 

One last hurdle was this: the collection Susan received contained more than 1,200 pieces produced over four years, a prodigious work rate, especially given those articles were written for a “broadsheet” paper and contained longer features as well as shorter news hits. 

She somehow had to whittle them down to just 100, a combination of analysis and colour pieces, mixed in with the news. 

Having considered arranging the pieces by theme or subject matter, she opted to arrange them year by year. 

“I decided ultimately to do it chronologically, because I felt that would be the best way to present it, as it was as a story that unfolded.”