James Rodgers was a journalist and BBC Foreign Correspondent in Moscow, Brussels and Gaza, for twenty years, reporting from New York and Washington after 9/11, and covering the war in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. Since 2012, he has taught Journalism at City, University of London, where he lectures in the History of Journalism, and the Reporting of Armed Conflict. In May 2021, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society,

New info on state press relations under Putin

AcknowledgementsList of illustrationsForeword by Martin SixsmithIntroduction1.Sympathies in the Struggle: Reporting Russia in Revolution, 19172.'The press is lying, or does not know': Russia goes to war with itself3.From 'A Wild And Barbarous Country' via Starvation to Stalinism4.Believe Everything But The Facts5.But What A Story Everything Tells Here: The Great Patriotic War6.Secrets, Censorship, and Cocktails with the Central Committee7.A Window On The Country: Reporting Reform and Ruin8.'Free for all': the Yeltsin era9.Becoming Strong Again?10.Russia: My HistoryBibliographyIndex

The story of western correspondents in Russia is the story of Russia's attitude to the west. Russia has at different times been alternately open to western ideas and contacts, cautious and distant or, for much of the twentieth century, all but closed off. From the revolutionary period of the First World War onwards, correspondents in Russia have striven to tell the story of a country known to few outsiders. Their stories have not always been well received by political elites, audiences, and even editors in their own countries-but their accounts have been a huge influence on how the West understands Russia. Not always perfect, at times downright misleading, they have, overall, been immensely valuable.In Assignment Moscow, former foreign correspondent James Rodgers analyses the news coverage of Russia throughout history, from the coverage of the siege of the Winter Palace and a plot to kill Stalin, to the Chernobyl explosion and the Salisbury poison scandal.