Book Talk: Odyssey Moscow by Michael Calvey

Join CERES for this book talk with author Michael Calvey! The discussion will be moderated by Dr. Angela Stent, Director Emerita of CERES.

Tuesday, April 8th
1:00 – 2:00 PM
Leavey Program Room (in the Leavey Center at Georgetown University)
Snacks will be served following the discussion

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 Pr*son 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.

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.

Michael (Mike) Calvey is an innovation enthusiast with three decades of experience across a range of industries, notably in fintech. He is currently the founder and Chairman of Baring Ventures, a private equity group with long-term stakes in Kaspi, Revout and Plata. Baring Venture’s funds are supported by more than 40 institutional investors, primarily pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, university endowments, and fund-of-funds from Europe, Asia, North America and the Middle East.
He was previously a founder and Co-Senior Partner of Baring Vostok, a private equity firm recognized for its early investments in several innovative and highly successful companies, including Yandex, Tinkoff, and Kaspi. In mid-2022, the investors in Baring Vostok funds approved a restructuring plan to divest their remaining Russian investments, severing the Russian nexus for the group. The transaction closed in April 2024 after receiving the required regulatory approvals. As part of the restructuring, Baring Vostok was divided into two separate and independent firms: Vostok Investments, owned by the former Russian managers of Baring Vostok, and Baring Ventures, which manages the international assets that remain as part of the group. The two firms are now entirely separate with no management or ownership overlap.
Before joining Baring Vostok, Michael lived in London and New York, where he worked mainly on oil and gas investment projects for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and Salomon Brothers.
Angela Stent is Senior Advisor to the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies and Professor Emerita of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She is also a Senior Nonresident Fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-chairs its Hewett Forum on Post-Soviet Affairs. She is a Senior Advisor to the United States Institute of Peace. From 2004-2006 she served as National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council. From 1999 to 2001, she served in the Office of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State. Dr. Stent received her B.A. from Cambridge University, her MSc. with distinction from the London School of Economics in Political Science and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Her primary research focus is Russian foreign policy, with special emphasis on the triangular U.S-Europe-Russia relationship. Her latest book is Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest (Twelve Books, 2019, updated paperback 2023) for which she won the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy’s prize for the best book on U.S-Russian Relations.

The Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies (CERES) would like to thank the Carnegie Corporation of New York for generous support of our programming.

Host or Publisher Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies -- (CERES)