Odyssey Moscow

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

Michael Calvey is a pioneering US-born financier, who made his fortune in post-Communist Russia. This is the story of how his life was turned upside down in 2019, when he was unjustly incarcerated in the country’s most notorious prison, awaiting trial for fraud.

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‘In his captivating memoir, Calvey describes the routine of his two-month incarceration in a cell shared with seven other inmates, as well as the often absurd constraints imposed on him.’ – Maria Lipman, Foreign Affairs

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.

‘His spirited memoir, Odyssey Moscow: One American’s Journey from Russia Optimist to Prisoner of the State, is an Icarus story of how a man seen as a legend in the Russian market ended up behind bars for an imaginary crime.’ – Anne Mcelvoy, Financial Times

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