concrete podcast

describe how you became the first American journalist to be exiled from Russia

well that that took place in 2013

and basically I had gone to ukraine before of course there was no war at that time

uh i went to keve to renew my visa this is a standard bureaucratic procedure i had all the necessary

documents and uh the the rule is the same for everybody. You have to

leave the country, get it renewed, and then come back in. I had an apartment in Moscow. I was

accredited in Moscow. I was planning to live there and stay there. And I was informed by a diplomat in the Russian embassy in Kiev that my presence on the territory

of the Russian Federation was undesirable, that this had been the conclusion of the so-called

competent organs.

That's a euphemism for the FSB, the Federal Security Service,

which is the successor organization to the KGB.

And I was banned from entering the country, so I couldn't go back.

I mean, all my things were there.

In the end, my son went to Moscow and packed up my

things and brought them back out. And that was it. The Moscow Times, which is an English language

paper in Moscow, wrote an article about it. They said it wasn't surprising that I was expelled. It was surprising

that it took so long. Really? Yeah. And in fact, I have a long, long record of confrontation

with the Russian authorities and then the Soviet authorities before them, because I went to

Russia for the first time as a correspondent in 1976, at that point, the very young correspondent of

the London Financial Times. And in 1979, there was an attempt to expel me,

which failed. It was based on the idea or based on the assumption that neither the British

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