Collision Course: Reporting Khrushchev’s Fierce Challenges to the West

Reporting from a Different Russia is the third volume in a memoir by CBS’s Moscow correspondent, Marvin Kalb, who covered Khrushchev’s Russia during the Cold War from 1956 to 1963, returning in 1965 and many times since. In this volume, he writes about a string of US-Soviet confrontations, including the running Berlin crisis, leading to the building of the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban missile crisis, including insights into Khrushchev’s reasoning, based on close observation of and direct conversations with the communist leader. Because it’s a memoir, the book also focuses on Kalb’s news making and ground breaking visit to communist Mongolia in August, 1962, his extensive coverage of Khrushchev, and throughout his observations about Russia and the Russian people, as Khrushchev attempts to reform Soviet communism, but fails abjectly and as a result loses his job.

Marvin Kalb is a former senior adviser to the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a Harvard Professor emeritus, former network news correspondent at NBC and CBS, senior fellow nonresident at the Brookings Institution, and author of 17 other books, the most recent of which is the first two volumes of his memoirs covering his years as a foreign correspondent in Russia, The Year I Was Peter the Great (Brookings, 2017) and Assignment Russia.