Post Moscow Correspondent at Last

This chapter highlights the author's return to Moscow as the Washington Post's correspondent. The mood in Moscow had changed; the seventy-four-year-old Leonid Brezhnev, in power for seventeen years, was surrounded by an aging leadership that valued stability and its privileged way of life. Though the Kremlin was still spouting the same rhetoric about Communism marching toward a bright future, there was an air of disillusion and resignation all over Moscow. As the severe Moscow winter of 1981–82 took hold, the weather matched a deepening chill in US–Soviet relations. The Kremlin lambasted Ronald Reagan for “a campaign of hatred” against the Soviet Union and for wanting to “hurl the world back to the dark ages of the Cold War.” The chapter then considers how the author's relationship with the US embassy in Moscow deteriorated as his analysis began often to diverge from that of the embassy and the CIA.