Out of the USSR: Rupert Cornwell's reports from the Soviet Union

Rupert Cornwell was The Independent’s award-winning correspondent in Moscow during the Gorbachev years. From a cramped office in central Moscow he entertainingly chronicled the day-to-day realities of Soviet life, while observing that Gorbachev was trying to jettison Communism without being seen to admit it. Sooner or later, he predicted, Gorbachev’s contradictions would bring him down.

This collection of some of Cornwell’s best articles published in The Independent between 1987 and 1991 provides a spellbinding account of the last years of the Soviet empire as they were happening, and at times seems to foreshadow more recent events.

Rupert Cornwell was “a great and gifted foreign correspondent, whose dispatches stand the test of time for their erudition, wisdom, wit and above all, for the elegance of their prose.” - Irish journalist and author Conor O’Clery